1,000 times faster data freeway coming up in the US

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen The University of California at Berkeley, and San Diego, to establish an exceptionally fast data transfer freeway called the Pacific Research Platform (PRP). The project outlay has been pegged at $ 5 million.

The two California Universities would build a freeway with end-to-end 10-100 gigabits per second (Gbps) connections capacity. The development would help in the study of particle physics, cancer genomics and other data- intensive fields, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) said.

The high-speed freeway once developed would give connectivity access to 10 University of California campuses, Stanford, San Diego State University, Caltech and USC and a number of universities outside California located on the West Coast. Some national laboratories too would be added to the data-sharing network.

The Pacific Research Platform launched early this year would connect the campus-specific networks in CENIC's California Research & Education Network (CalREN), Pacific Wave and the Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet).

"Research in data-intensive fields is increasingly multi-investigator and multi-institutional, depending on ever more rapid access to ultra-large heterogeneous and widely distributed data sets," said University of California at San Diego Chancellor, Pradeep K Khosla.

The final launch of the platform would be phased in two part, the first would focus on sending its data-sharing architecture to all campuses connected with the network.

The Pacific Research Platform (PRP), would, within a few years, give participating universities and other research institutions the ability to move data 1,000 times faster compared to speeds on today's inter-campus shared internet.

The PRP's data sharing architecture, with end-to-end 10-100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) connections, will enable region-wide virtual co-location of data with computing resources and enhanced security options. PRP links most of the research universities on the West Coast (the 10 University of California campuses, San Diego State University, Caltech, USC, Stanford, University of Washington) via the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC)/Pacific Wave's 100G infrastructure. To demonstrate extensibility PRP also connects the University of Hawaii System, Montana State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and the University of Amsterdam. Other research institutions in the PRP include Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and four national supercomputer centers (SDSC-UCSD, NERSC-LBNL, NAS-NASA Ames, and NCAR). In addition, the PRP will interconnect with the NSF-funded Chameleon NSFCloud research testbed and the Chicago StarLight/MREN community.

Fifteen existing multi-campus data-intensive application teams act as drivers of the PRP, providing feedback over the five years to the technical design staff. These application areas include accelerator particle physics, astronomical telescope survey data, gravitational wave detector data analysis, galaxy formation and evolution, cancer genomics, human and microbiome 'omics integration, biomolecular structure modeling, natural disaster, climate, CO2 sequestration simulations, as well as scalable visualization, virtual reality, and ultra-resolution video. The PRP will be extensible both across other data-rich research domains as well as to other national and international networks, potentially leading to a national and eventually global data-intensive research cyberinfrastructure.