Advanced Networking Research Initiatives

Enhancing communications services and networks, including Internet technologies, is accomplished by the effort of multiple organizations, for example, through academic research, federal agencies (especially the National Science Foundation, NSF, the Department of Energy, DOE, and DARPA), commercial research, standards organizations, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and IEEE, and related organizations worldwide, many based on open architecture and standards.

With its networking infrastructure partners, iCAIR is involved in multiple network research initiatives focused primarily on designing and developing next-generation communication services, architecture, and technologies that support global data-intensive science. Earlier initiatives centered on programmable network services for science applications enabled by distributed computational Grids - high-performance "cyber-infrastructure" comprised of large-scale, highly distributed resources. These advanced infrastructures allow scientists and engineers to interact dynamically with worldwide advanced facilities, enabling powerful new methods for scientific discovery in many disciplinary and interdisciplinary topics.

More recently, many of these research initiatives have focused on Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI), primarily Software Defined Networking (SDN). These methods allow network optimization by enabling scientific workflows to control core resources directly, including network resources. Increasingly, these innovations are based on high-fidelity measurements of network activity and sophisticated analytics of those measurements, including those using AL/ML/DP techniques.