The third area of focus was smart manufacturing, chaired by UCLA’s Jim Davis. Davis, together with Mark Goodstein of the Center for Smart Manufacturing Innovation (CSMI) and Caltech’s Si-ping Han, described the complex landscape of smart manufacturing to workshop attendees, from the community-building that must inform the design of any network that enables smart manufacturing, to making sure that manufacturers can take best advantage of nanoscale science during design, modeling, and assembly, and proposing potential business models for organizations that seek to promote and advocate for smart manufacturing.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) emerged as a major topic of subsequent panels on network innovation and testbeds. ESnet’s Inder Monga chaired a panel on 100-Gigabit network innovations including software-defined networking enabling the network to become a programmable instrument. The San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Mike Norman, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories’ Zarija Lukic, Caltech’s Harvey Newman, Stanford’s Johan van Reijendam, and Clemson University’s KC Wang all spoke of the importance of dynamic circuits enabled by SDN to take full advantage of what 100G networking can provide, especially for the data-intensive sciences.
USC’s John Silvester chaired the day’s final panel on scientific workflows and testbeds. Ewa Deelman, also of USC, discussed how scientific workflow and network design can be used to inform one another to optimize both science and network. CENIC’s Brian Court described the California OpenFlow Testbed Network (COTN), created by CENIC to enable network researchers in California to carry out OpenFlow and SDN-related research. Brian Tierney of ESnet described that network’s own tiered testbed, with one tier for 100G research, one OpenFlow-enabled tier, and another dark-fiber tier. UCSD’s Dallas Thornton and the UC Office of the President’s Paul Weiss concluded the panel programming with discussions of cloud services implementations at SDSC and the importance of efficiency in network engineering.
Bridging the gap between campus innovations to California and national testbeds was the topic for the concluding discussion, led by Bell, Fox, and Smarr. Once again, the panelists and attendees quickly focused on the vital importance of reaching out to a wide a range of application users to ensure that any ultra-high-performance network is the end-product of collaboration between network specialists and the widest possible breadth of app users starting from the earliest design stages. “Without the application drivers,” Smarr observed, “you end up with empty networks.” However, the day demonstrated that many data-intensive applications are ready and able to make the jump to 100G optical flows, opening entirely new vistas for scientific discovery.
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About CENIC • www.cenic.org
California’s education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state’s K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC’s Associate researchers and educators are engaged.
About Calit2 • www.calit2.net
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) is $400 million academic research institution jointly run by the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Irvine. Calit2 was established in 2000 as one of the four UC Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation. As a multidisciplinary research institution, it is devoted to conducting cutting-edge research discovering new ways in which emerging technologies can improve the state’s economy and citizens’ quality of life. Keeping in mind its goal of addressing large-scale societal issues, Calit2 extends beyond education and research by also focusing on the development and deployment of prototype infrastructure for testing new solutions in real world environments. Calit2 also provides an academic research environment in which students can work alongside industry professionals to take part in conducting research and prototyping and testing new technologies.
About ESnet • www.es.net
The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is DOE’s high-performance networking facility, engineered and optimized for large-scale science. Funded by the Office of Science (SC) and managed by Berkeley Lab, ESnet interconnects the entire national laboratory system, including its supercomputer centers and user facilities –enabling tens of thousands of scientists to transfer data, access remote resources, and collaborate productivel