CHAPEL HILL, February 18, 2011–With funds from the GENI Project Office (GPO) distributed through Stanford University, RENCI and its Triangle area university partners recently received five OpenFlow-enabled network switches valued at $3,000 per unit.

The donation is meant to help campuses create or expand their OpenFlow networks for both research and production uses.

The switches will be deployed on campuses and in the Points of Presence of RENCI’s Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), a regional optical network test bed used for experiments with disruptive networking technologies.

The OpenFlow switches will be connected to BEN and will enable new cutting-edge networking research and educational opportunities at UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and Duke University. They will be installed over the next few weeks at the BEN PoPs at RENCI and UNC Chapeil Hill and in laboratories and facilities of the computer science departments at Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State.

OpenFlow is an open standard developed at Stanford that allows researchers to run network experiments on campus networks. It is added as a feature to some commercial Ethernet switches and makes it possible to separate the switch’s packet forwarding, or data, path from its high-level routing decisions, or the control path. The separation of paths lets researchers easily deploy innovative routing and switching protocols in networks and is especially useful on networks that run virtual machines, need high security or involve research on next-generation Internet protocols.

“OpenFlow is a great addition to the research network infrastructure on our campuses,” said Ilia Baldine, RENCI’s director of networking research. “Having OpenFlow on BEN is especially important because BEN is our test bed for the National Science Foundation GENI Initiative.  It gives us more flexibility with experiments involving network and compute and storage infrastructure that can support a cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) paradigm.”

GENI, the NSF-funded Global Environment for Network Innovation,  includes several multi-campus networking research teams who are prototyping and designing this global experimental facility. RENCI’s GENI research is a partnership with Duke University researchers to deploy the Open Resource Control Architecture (ORCA), a software framework developed by Duke computer scientist Jeff Chase, on BEN. The BEN GENI “island” is a part of the expanding GENI test bed infrastructure.

In addition to enhancing research using BEN, OpenFlow technology also will support experiments and educational programs in the three universities’ computer science programs.

• At UNC-Chapel Hill, the OpenFlow-enabled switch in the computer science department’s networking laboratory will give students hands-on experience implementing and evaluating OpenFlow technology and will present a new focus for research projects.
• At NC State, the switch will connect a general-purpose test bed used by computer science students for research and class projects, giving students the chance to study OpenFlow as a platform used in network programming.
• At Duke, OpenFlow will be integrated into coursework on distributed systems, operating systems and data-intensive systems.

For more Information:

OpenFlow Website

RENCI’s BEN Project Page

GENI Website

ORCA-BEN Website

The NC State node of BEN, consisting of Infinera digital optical networking hardware, connects campus researchers to the experimental network through RENCI at NC State.

RALEIGH, NC, March 11, 2009—RENCI’s NC State engagement center recently completed upgrades to support the installation of the Breakable Experimental Network (BEN). BEN serves as a test bed for experimentation with new networking technologies that will help make networked communications faster, easier and more reliable. BEN is “breakable” because it is not meant to be a stable commercial network, such as those that keep the commercial Internet running. Instead BEN allows network researchers to experiment with disruptive technologies—those that are likely to have a major impact in the years to come and thereby disrupt standard operating procedures for networks.

The new network connects RENCI facilities at NC State, Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, RENCI’s main office at Europa Center in Chapel Hill, and MCNC in Research Triangle Park. RENCI administers the network and provides access to the fiber for researchers at the Triangle area campuses through its engagement centers. With funding from the National Science Foundation, RENCI and Duke are using BEN as a test bed for the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project. GENI’s aim is to forge new solutions to problems facing today’s Internet including inadequate security, reliability, manageability and scalability.

RENCI at NC State also upgraded its 170-inch by 96-inch visualization display wall into a fully digital system that more accurately adjusts images on the screen. The display system uses 16 projectors and can display images at a resolution of 5,120 by 2,880 pixels.

The visualization wall allows researchers to view large-scale, time-dependent data as color-coded visual simulations of complicated processes, from astrophysical phenomena to the relationships among documents in a large data archive.

For more on BEN, see http://ben.renci.org.

For more on GENI, see http://www.geni.net

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute, a multi-institutional organization, brings together multidisciplinary experts and advanced technological capabilities to address pressing research issues and to find solutions to complex problems that affect the quality of life in North Carolina, our nation and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, visualization, networking and data technologies to catalyze new collaborations and solve problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.