Examples of Research Projects

NSF ACCESS is a program established and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to help researchers and educators to utilize the nation’s advanced computing systems and services at no cost. ACCESS-integrated research computing and data services are linked via CONECTnet, a Layer 3 VPN provisioned over Internet2, which provides ease of deployment and operational convenience.

FABRIC is adaptive programmable research infrastructure for computer science and science applications. It is an everywhere-programmable nationwide instrument composed of novel extensible network elements equipped with large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high-speed, dedicated optical links.

Internet2 connects FABRIC with multiple 100G connections, allowing experiments to connect with commercial cloud providers using its programmable dedicated Cloud Connect capability as well as its research-focused IP cloud connection. The Internet2 Network is utilized for non-dedicated connectivity for individual participants to the FABRIC core.

LHCONE is a dedicated network overlay (VRF) connecting Tier-1, 2, and 3 centers to handle enormous data volumes from LHC experiments, which Internet2 helps transport in North America. Internet2 moves 10-30 Gbps of sustained traffic on average weekday to connectors, international transit peers, and other partners. Internet2 also participates in next-generation routing/telemetry activities.

The National Research Platform (NRP) is a community-owned research and education platform connecting researchers and educators to foster collaboration, accelerate innovation, and share resources. NRP provides access to cutting-edge technologies in AI, high-performance computing, data storage, and networking. Open to all nonprofit higher education institutions, from community colleges to top research universities. 

Internet2 provides networking and data storage support for the National Research Platform (NRP) project to achieve transparent and rapid data access and gathers computing resources, research and education networks, edge computing devices, and instruments to expedite science and enable transformative discoveries.

The Open Science Pool (OSPool) provides common service and support for resource providers and scientific institutions using a distributed fabric of high-throughput computational services. Internet2 invests in hardware deployments and leverages its network resources to directly connect researchers working within the OSPool.

The Open Science Data Federation (OSDF) is a service that provides data access and transfer capabilities for open science research, built on open-source projects including Pelican, XRootD, CVMFS, and Kubernetes. It features globally distributed caches located throughout the world at participating organizations and on network backbones, with client tools such as Pelican and CVMFS available for every operating system. As of last year, OSDF has served over 214 PB of data at an average rate of 7 Gbps, with nearly 5 billion objects read.

Caching Nodes Provide High-Performance Data Storage, Transfer

Internet2 is pleased to host some of the highest utilization OSDF cache nodes directly on the Internet2 backbone with 100G interconnections. Internet2 has deployed 11 100G-attached domestic and one international (in Amsterdam) cache and compute nodes. These nodes fill key latency and location gaps to Internet2 member institutions in support of the OSDF goals.

Internet2 has provided support for member demonstrations at SC, The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, every year since Internet2 instantiated a physical network in 1999. Internet2 connects its network to SCinet at the conference venue and provides access to all its network services, including R&E IP service, the Internet2 Peer Exchange (I2PX), the Advanced Layer 2 Service, Cloud Connect, and its wave service. Internet2 also has contributed personnel to SCinet to support measurement and WAN connectivity, specific prototype network connectivity for its members, and network performance diagnosis.

Internet2 Support Leads to Prototypes and Then Production
Internet2 has supported several new prototype capabilities at SC that led to production services. These include 1, 10, 100, and 400 Gigabit Ethernet; dynamic VLAN networks; software-defined networking (including wide-area OpenFlow); and perfSONAR measurement. Internet2 has also supported wide-area file system demonstrations and data-intensive science applications.