MRI: Acquisition of GatorCloud: Enabling High-Impact Scientific Research and Collaboration via Software Defined Networks and Cloud Services

MRI: Acquisition of GatorCloud: Enabling High-Impact Scientific Research and Collaboration via Software-Defined Networks and Cloud Services

Abstract

Cyberinfrastructure has fundamentally transformed the landscape of many disciplines, becoming the engine of change for the next revolution. We propose the GatorCloud cyberinfrastructure to dramatically boost the Campus Research Network (CRN) to over 100Gb/s backbone networks connecting multiple primary sites of data centers across the campus and further enhance it with the cutting-edge software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities and novel cloud services. Additional SDN switches will be deployed across multiple sites of the Florida LambdaRail (FLR).

GatorCloud will strengthen Florida's participation in high-impact national and international projects, such as the CMS experiment that recently discovered the Higgs boson, the Open Science Grid, the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), Kepler, and FutureGrid. These projects involve terabyte to petabyte storage and require terascale to petascale computations. With GatorCloud, UF can serve the needs of terabyte data throughput around the world for researchers and their collaborators with transformative capabilities and services.

GatorCloud is the first SDN-enabled campus cloud initiative, offering novel cloud services, such as HPC as a Service (HPCaaS), Network as a Service (NaaS), and Cloud-in-Cloud as a Service (CCaaS). It will have transformative impact on shaping the future of cyberinfrastructure. It provides a production-level environment for research in the forefront of computer science and engineering, e.g., cloud computing and storage, networking, bioinformatics, multimedia, data mining, cyber-physical systems, and parallel and distributed computing.

It offers a unique interdisciplinary resource for UF and its partners to train and educate graduate and undergraduate students in many related courses and research projects.