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Open Exchange Points

StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility

With its research partners, iCAIR designed, developed, and now operates the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility, which interconnects major international research and education networks worldwide.

StarLight, was created as an evolution of the earlier STAR TAP (Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point—the world's first international exchange developed to support advanced digital communication services for worldwide scientific research communities), as an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications.

StarLight is co-managed by the StarLight Consortium, comprised of iCAIR, the University of California at San Diego, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and the Netherlands' SURFnet.

iCAIR is involved with numerous research projects centered on StarLight and related facilities. The StarLight research participants are creating new methods and technologies to allow for greater services and configuration flexibility than existing networks. StarLight provides tools, techniques, and technologies that allow end-processes to dynamically control lightpaths, including those supporting 1.2 Tbps flows. These mechanisms can empower applications to adjust and optimize network resources to meet precise requirements dynamically.

The StarLight consortium is participating in the creation of a global proving ground in support of distributed computational facilities for data-intensive eScience applications, including network performance measurement and analysis and computing and networking technology evaluations. StarLight is also a co-location facility with enough space, power, air conditioning, and fiber to allow its members to engage in next-generation optical network and application research and development activities. StarLight provides support for multiple network and computing experimental research testbeds, including those that are national and international in scale.

The StarLight Facility also provides core services and resources for the Global Research Platform.

StarLight International Software Defined Exchange (iSDX)

With initial funding from the National Science Foundation and with its global research partners, iCAIR designed, developed, implemented, and is now operating an International Software Defined Exchange (iSDX) at the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility, which integrates multiple services, many specifically designed for large scale global data-intensive science. The StarLight SDX is based on a flexible, scalable, programmable platform. The SDX initiative comprises a) production services, b) a series of experimental research projects, c) an experimental research testbed, and d) a means of integrating multiple experimental research testbeds.

Services incorporate those based on 100 and 400 Gbps Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) for Wide Area Networks (WANs), including trans-oceanic WANs. Currently, a key focus is scaling to 400, 800, and 1.2 Tbps Gbps WAN and LAN E2E technologies that provide high-performance transport services for petascale science, controlled using programmable data plane techniques such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and techniques for programming data planes, e.g., with the P4 network programming language. Another research area is providing interoperability between services among open exchange points.

 AutoGOLE/NSI/MEICAN

With the international networking community, the StarLight consortium, iCAIR is a founding member of the AutoGOLE, a worldwide collaboration of Open eXchange Points and research and education networks, system developers, site software, network and data management system developers, and university and laboratory-based scientists in several disciplines. The AutoGOLE initiative is combining services, systems, and foundation global persistent infrastructure to enable true end-to-end dynamic, multidomain network service provisioning, and management for science workflows, including those used by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Vera Rubin Observatory as well those used by many other disciplines. AutoGOLE services include the multidomain network elements and network stacks within end systems. This initiative develops automated end-to-end network services by making connection requests with the Network Service Interface Connection Service (NSI-CS). 

Many years previously, iCAIR participated in an international collaboration (the Global Lambda Integrated Facility – the GLIF consortium) to design and implement GOLEs (GLIF Open Lightpath Exchanges), such as the StarLight facility. GOLEs, Open Exchanges (OXs), operated by participants, are specialized facilities based on a foundation of DWDM equipment used to terminate lambdas and perform lightpath switching to enable end-to-end path creation. Other services are established on this foundation, including bilateral L2 and L3 services and hybrid multi-layer services. These facilities interconnect NREN services, including those not based on lightpaths, e.g., L2 and L3 or L3 only. 

The AutoGOLE initiative established a partnership with the Open Grid Forum (OGF) standards organization to define and implement a prototype Network Services Interface (NSI) Connection Service architectural framework (V 2.0 – R117, which formalizes NML and NSI-EXT schema changes) and protocol suite. NSI provides the most complete architectural framework and protocol suite for dynamic E2E multidomain WAN services, including services at exchange points. NSI provides interconnections via a web service API, including the Connection Service, Topology Description, Topology Distribution, and Discovery Service. NSI 2.0 implementations have been successfully implemented as a production capability at multiple open exchanges, including StarLight and by a number of NRENs in Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America. 

Increasingly, networks across the globe use NSI to provision and de-provision international network services, saving a considerable amount of time and effort for NOCs to facilitate international network service requests. International circuits are provided in minutes or seconds instead of multiple days or weeks - manual human interaction is limited or eliminated. NSI has been augmented by the MEICAN tools created by RNP, the Brazilian R&E network. The AutoGOLE initiative now includes MEICAN as a graphical user interface enabling collaboration by NOCs across multidomain infrastructures.