CC* Networking Infrastructure: Advanced Network For Research at UNC Charlotte

A diverse team of faculty researchers, research computing, and networking experts from across UNC Charlotte are collaborating to develop and deploy an advanced network for research across the campus. This network dramatically improves digital communication between researchers, scientific instrumentation, visualization workstations, high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure and external collaborators.

Access to the advanced network enables higher speed to existing research workflows and allows for new research processes previously unavailable to the team. For example, massive datasets from multiple DNA sequencing instruments are streamed to powerful HPC clusters thus removing data analysis bottlenecks. Research applying motion analysis and artificial intelligence to Future of Work research, natural language processing and cyber physical systems are also supported.

Applications include fluid dynamics simulation of airflow, which carries infectious microbes, in public transportation. Research collaborations between UNC Charlotte and other universities is enhanced by speeding acquisition and sharing of research results. Students from varied backgrounds, including UNC Charlotte’s large cohorts from underrepresented groups and first generation college students will work with this state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure in their coursework and research projects.

The design is a campus wide 100Gb fibre-based network with Science DMZ including a Data Transfer Node enabling data flows separate from the day-to-day traffic of University business. The network is implemented as a spine-leaf architecture with two spines (64x100GbE) interconnected to each other with 100Gb links by MLAG. One spine is placed in the HPC Data Center and the other is placed in a separate campus Data Center.

The network has 6 Leafs (32x100 GbE) supporting connectivity between buildings housing academic departments and HPC infrastructure. Performance is monitored and tuned with PerfSonar nodes. Security is monitored through Zeek (40Gb/s) nodes.

The network and Science DMZ are tuned and optimized in collaboration between researchers and network architects.

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.