CC* Networking Infrastructure: Building a Scalable and Polymorphic Cyberinfrastructure for Diverse Research and Education Needs at Illinois State University

Faculty researchers and networking experts at Illinois State University are teaming up to create an advanced cyberinfrastructure to meet the evolving and diverse research and educational demands of the campus. This cyberinfrastructure boosts the campus research network to a full 100G capacity, integrates a 100G Science DMZ for better external connections, and introduces a 100G Software Defined Networking (SDN) enabled testbed for creative research opportunities.

This enhancement dramatically improves digital interaction among researchers, scientific instruments, visualization stations, high-performance computing (HPC) resources, and external collaborators, elevating research speed and enabling methodologies previously out of reach. For example, large environmental and hydrology data collected by unmanned aircrafts can now be managed through the SDN, quickly processed by HPC clusters, and shared with external collaborators for immediate machine-learning analysis.

This infrastructure also benefits students, particularly those from underrepresented groups and first-generation college attendees, by providing them with hands-on experience with top-tier technology in their studies and research projects.

The cyberinfrastructure's modular design caters to varied research and educational requirements. The Science DMZ module, featuring a high-performance switch and a cutting-edge data transfer node, isolates research data traffic from general university operations. The on-campus research network employs a spine-leaf architecture for its scalability and reliability, consisting of two interconnected spines (64x100GbE) using 100Gb links, located in the HPC and another campus data center.

The SDN-based testbed adopts a similar spine-leaf architecture with a single Spine for now, prized for its adaptability and equipped with hybrid SDN switches that have built-in controllers for innovative research exploration. Performance monitoring and adjustments are carried out with PerfSonar nodes, in a collaborative effort between researchers and network architects to ensure the cyberinfrastructure's optimal performance.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.