La Mirada, CA & Berkeley, CA — March 2, 2020 — In recognition of work on international cyberinfrastructure research and development, the Korea Research Environment Open NETwork (KREONET) is being awarded the 2020 CENIC Innovations in Networking Award for Research Applications. The team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), which has operated KREONET since 1988, collaborated with partners at CENIC to demonstrate that geographical distance is no longer a barrier to the transfer of big data.
Project members at KISTI being recognized are: Director of KREONET Woojin Seok; Principal Researchers Seunghae Kim, Minki Noh, and Jeonghoon Moon; and Senior Researcher Wonhuck Lee. Many other professionals including Professor Minsun Lee are supporting and advising the project.
KISTI has participated in the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) for over four years via CENIC and the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP. The PRP integrates the Data Transfer Node/Science DMZ technology pioneered by the US Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) into a high-capacity regional “freeway system” that makes it possible to move large amounts of data between scientists’ labs and their collaborators’ sites, supercomputer centers, or data repositories without performance degradation.
Together with CENIC, KISTI scientists helped the PRP definitively show that Science DMZ technology works over extremely long distances, demonstrating high-performance data transfers between Korea and the US that achieved 99Gbps over 100Gbps capacity.
“This is an important achievement for network technology,” said PRP Co-Principal Investigator Tom DeFanti. “By setting up Science DMZs, using the data-transfer node infrastructure, and using the PRP cyberinfrastructure running over CENIC’s 100 Gbps optical links, researchers in the US, Korea, and beyond are now able to transfer data sets over transpacific distances at faster and faster speeds. Effective transpacific transfers are many thousands of times faster than they were just a few years ago before KISTI began working with the PRP. We have eliminated the network as a bottleneck for data transfer and now the speed of the network is challenging the speed of computing resources themselves.”
Through KREONET, KISTI has connected a large number of institutions with Science DMZs and is expanding to additional sites. In January, KISTI announced the construction of the Science Super Highway. This next-generation research platform enables the extremely large data transfer for scientific data generated at large-scale experimental facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Square Kilometer Array (SKA), Korean e-VLBI project, and Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR). Based on the ScienceDMZ model and global collaboration with major international partners, the Science Super Highway is the result of $10 million invested over three years by the Korean government for the development of infrastructure to support big data. The research platform supports many different science applications, including astronomy, high-energy physics, weather forecast and climate research, biomedical science and genomics, and fusion energy.
Today, nearly all scientific research and data analysis involves remote collaboration. To work effectively and efficiently on multi-institutional projects, researchers depend heavily on high-speed access to large data sets and computing resources.
“To accelerate the rate of scientific discovery, researchers must get the data they need, where they need it, and when they need it,” said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. “This requires a high-performance data freeway system in which we use optical lightpaths to connect data generators and users of that data. The network engineering achievements in this award are enabled by high-functioning physical and human networks, both of which are essential and notable.”
A highly collaborative partner, KISTI has also worked on a National Science Foundation proposal with CENIC; provided the efforts for collaborative research for distributed Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing at an international scale, allied with University of California San Diego's Cognitive Hardware And Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI) project; and participated in CENIC workshops to introduce and share the status and progress of KREONET.
The CENIC Innovations in Networking Awards are presented each year at CENIC’s annual conference to highlight exemplary people, projects, and organizations that leverage high-bandwidth networking. The CENIC conference will be held March 16 – 18, 2020, in Monterey, California. Learn more and register to attend.