Direct-to-Discovery (D2D)
The Direct-to-Discovery (D2D) program at Georgia Tech brings world-class researchers and their laboratories into K-12 classrooms. D2D enables teachers and researchers to collaborate in providing rich, up-to-date science content that inspires, motivates, and empowers experiential learning.
The D2D program features three essential components: the underlying network infrastructure, the enabling technologies, and a collaborative professional development framework. Combining real-time, high definition videoconferencing and direct access to the high-speed global research and education network infrastructure with curriculum development expertise provides K-12 students with a unique, immersive learning experience.
GENI@SoX
The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) – www.geni.net is a unique virtual laboratory for at-scale networking experimentation where the brightest minds unite to envision and create new possibilities of future internets. The GENI mission is to:
- open the way for transformative research at the frontiers of network science and engineering; and
- inspire and accelerate the potential for groundbreaking innovations of significant socio-economic impact
SoX has been an active participant in the GENI project and have deployed an OpenFlow substrate in the Southeast region to enable GENI OpenFlow access at 19 member institutions and collaboration with GENI rack deployment projects. This project has increased the accessibility of GENI throughout the Southeastern United States. The project leverages previous work deploying GENI services on the Georgia Tech and Clemson campuses. GENI@SoX deployments are fully compliant with GENI software standards for GENI aggregates, as published at GENI Engineering Conferences. The sites use one or more GENI Aggregate Managers controlling access to the aggregate resources. The sites also support GENI experimenter access. The sites support shared GENI monitoring and operations procedures and interfaces for the meso-scale infrastructure as published at GENI Engineering Conferences.
Current Capabilities
The first OpenFlow enabled switch was installed at 55 Marietta St on May 16, 2012. The switch initially provides direct OpenFlow capable switching of VLAN 1750 between Internet 2, Georgia Tech and Clemson University. There is a FOAM/FlowVisor control server configured as well.
International
SoX is part of the AtlanticWave peering fabric. Internationally, SoX peers with the RedCLARA network in South America.
RPKI
SoX is working on an NSF funded project to evaluate deployment options for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and develop best practices for the research networking community as a first step toward securing the Internet’s routing infrastructure. This work includes designing and evaluating the architectures for managing Resource Certificates and Resource Origin Authorizations (ROAs).
The work involves deploying RPKI across 21 university networks connected to the SoX regional network based in Atlanta, GA. As the system is deployed, researchers will need to watch the operation for several months to study route stability and determine best practices for further deployment across the Internet.
Software Defined Exchange (SDX)
The Software Defined Exchange (SDX) applies the principles of Software Defined Networking to the Internet Exchange to overcome long standing limitations in inter-domain routing. The goal is to provide a rich set of options for specifying policy at the exchange point to describe how traffic is handled between network operators. SoX is participating in several SDX related projects including a regional SDX deployment for the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI).
Georgia Tech and SoX were awarded the NSF ACI-1451024 project called “AtlanticWave-Software Defined Exchange: A Distributed Intercontinental Experimental Software Defined Exchange (AtlanticWave-SDX)” which is comprised of two components: (1) a network infrastructure development component to bridge 100G of network capacity between Research and Education backbone networks in the U.S. and South America; and (2) an innovation component to build a distributed intercontinental experimental SDX between the U.S. and South America, by leveraging open exchange point resources at SoX (Atlanta), AMPATH (Miami), and Southern Light (São Paulo, Brazil).