Toward the National Research Platform

Academic researchers need a simple data sharing architecture with end-to-end 10-to-100Gbps performance to enable virtual co-location of large amounts of data with computing. End-to-end is a difficult problem to solve in general because the networks between ends (campuses, data repositories, etc.) typically traverse multiple network management domains: campus, regional, and national. No one organization owns the responsibility for providing scientists with high-bandwidth disk-to-disk performance. Toward the National Research Platform (TNRP), addresses issues critical to scaling end-to-end data sharing. TNRP will instrument a large federation of heterogeneous “national-regional-state” networks (NRSNs) to greatly improve end-to-end network performance across the nation.