SCIENCE

Projects to advance innovation of next-generation networks worldwide

Internet2 has announced two research and two student projects as the 2011 Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) award winners for innovation in advanced network applications for collaborative research and education. Winners received their awards, and presented their applications at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting in Raleigh, N.C. on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

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Researcher winners Scott Deal from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and Matthew Burtner from the University of Virginia won for Auksalaq--a Telematic Opera. Also, a team from the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won for their application, On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS). ESnet development collaborators include Chin Guok, Evangelos Chaniotakis, Andy Lake, Eric Pouyoul and Mary Thompson.

The IDEA student winners are Baris Aksanli, a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering from the University of California San Diego, for Monitoring and Visualization of Energy consumed by Networks (MAVEN), and Kyung- Hwa Kim, a Ph.D. student in computer science from Columbia University, for DYSWIS, a Collaborative Network Fault Diagnosis System project.

"All of the winning applications have applied advanced networking technology to enable significant progress in research, teaching, learning or collaboration to increase the impact of next-generation networks around the world,” said Tom Knab, chair of the IDEA award judging committee and chief information officer, Case Western Reserve University’s College of Arts & Sciences. “The winning submissions were from an exceptionally strong nominations pool and represent a cross-section of the wide-ranging innovation that is occurring within the Internet2 member community. Also, for the first time, we added a category for applications developed by students and those were remarkable for their creativity and relevance.”

Auksalaq, a Telematic Opera represents a new generation of artistic works revolving around the exploitation of high bandwidth networks in the pursuit of live, interactive expression by combining computer interactivity with music, dance, drama, art and literature. The opera introduces an innovative toolkit of telematic software applications developed at the University of Virginia Interactive Media Research Group and the IUPUI Tavel Arts Technology Lab that facilitate a seamless, multi-site, integrated presentation entailing all of the artistic elements (music, media, movement, videography, audio processing and audience interactivity) to create an interactive, multi-dimensional experience. See www.Auksalaq.org for more details.

On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS) is an open source, software application that allows users to create and reserve virtual circuits with guaranteed end-to-end performance. These circuits are tuned for exchanging large data sets between collaboration sites and can do so across multiple network domains – especially important in the R&E community where various national, regional and local networks are used to connect collaborators. OSCARS provides users the ability to engineer, manage and automate bandwidth based on the specific needs of their work with geographically dispersed scientific instruments, supercomputing resources, and collaborations. Currently OSCARS circuits carry 50 percent of ESnet’s annual 60 petabytes of traffic and has also been implemented by many R&E networks worldwide including Internet2, U.S. LHCnet, NORDUNet, and RNP in Brazil to enable virtual circuit services for their respective communities. OSCARS’ development was funded by the Department of Energy, Office of Science. See www.es.net/services/virtual-circuits-oscars for more details.

Baris Aksanli’s project, Monitoring and Visualization of Energy consumed by Networks (MAVEN), is a prototype portal that intends to allow network engineers, energy efficiency researchers and network equipment vendors a real-time view of live network energy consumption and environmental conditions in advanced networks and equipment. The MAVEN software also will allow network operators to establish a power baseline for their current generation of network equipment, which saves money and allows better planning for power contracts with the collocation providers. Aksanli led the development of the first MAVEN prototype as part of his summer internship with ESnet. Inder Monga and Jon Dugan of ESnet provided mentorship and guidance for the project. ESnet intends to use MAVEN as a basis for monitoring power consumption on its network in the future. As large-scale science continues to become more data-intensive, MAVEN will help provide valuable information to build the next generation of advanced networks and equipment.

Kyung-Hwa Kim’s project, DYSWIS, is a collaborative network fault diagnosis system, with a complete framework for fault detection, user collaboration and fault diagnosis for advanced networks. With the increase in application complexity, the need for network fault diagnosis for end-users has increased. However, existing failure diagnosis techniques fail to assist end-users in accessing applications and services. The key idea of DYSWIS is a collaboration of end-users to diagnose a network fault in real-time to collect diverse information from different parts of the networks and infer the cause of failure.

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