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Linking South and North America via a South Atlantic high-performance Research & Education Network (REN) with the nations of Africa’s researchers, students, and knowledge sharing communities has become an increasingly strategic priority. Africa offers research and education communities with unique biological, environmental, geological, anthropological, and cultural resources. Research challenges in atmospheric and geosciences, materials sciences, tropical diseases, biology, astronomy, and other disciplines will benefit by enhancing the technological and social connections between the research and education communities of the U.S., Brazil / Latin America, and Africa. For many years, we have seen the dramatic benefits of high-performance networking in all areas of science and engineering. The Americas Africa Research and eduCation Lightpaths (AARCLight) project (NSF OAC-1638990) provided support for a grant to plan, design, and define a strategy for high capacity research and education network connectivity between the U.S. and West Africa. The study indicated a high level of enthusiasm to engage in collaborative research between the U.S., Brazil, and the African communities. There is collaborative interest in sharing network infrastructure resources in the US at AMPATH in Miami, in Fortaleza and Sao Paulo, Brazil where RedClara and ANSP connect at SouthernLight, and in Cape Town, South Africa. There is strong evidence of multiple ongoing domain science projects between the U.S., Brazil, and Africa that would benefit from a new South Atlantic link. The results of this planning grant successfully supported the need to light a 100G pathway using the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) connecting to AmLight-ExP in Fortaleza, Brazil, and via the West African Cable System (WACS) cable to the Cape Town, South Africa open exchange point. Based on these findings, AmLight-ExP , a high-performance R&E network supported by a consortium of participants and funding from the NSF is the steward of the SACS 100G link. With collaborative support from UbuntuNet Alliance, RNP, SANReN, and others, AmLight is taking steps to make this first South Atlantic R&E network path available to connect all three continents. This critical infrastructure establishes a new South Atlantic route to integrate with AmLight-ExP, adding resiliency to the global R&E network fabric by adding a new path to Africa and Europe from the southern hemisphere. The SACS cable, shown on Figure 1 as a purple dashed line between Fortaleza, Brazil, and Luanda, Angola, is the first east - west subsea cable in the South Atlantic. We will leverage network infrastructure in the southern hemisphere that is available to the R&E community including spectrum on Monet committed to the AmLight-ExP linking Miami, Fortaleza and São Paulo; a 100G Ethernet link on SACS; TENET’s capacity on WACS; the R&E exchange point in Cape Town-ZAOXI operated by SANReN (South African National Research Network) and TENET connected to WACS and the Ubuntunet Alliance Network connecting East Africa; and the South America eXchange R&E exchange point (SAX) in Fortaleza, operated by RNP and connected via AmLight-ExP via Monet to São Paulo and Miami. The paper will present 1) the key partners in the AmLight-SACS collaboration, 2) the activation plan, 3) how the network will be instrumented for performance measurements, and to capture data for network analytics, and 4) science drivers that will benefit from the use of a South Atlantic network route between the U.S., South America and West Africa. 

Linking South and North America via a South Atlantic high-performance Research & Education Network (REN) with the nations of Africa’s researchers, students, and knowledge sharing communities has become an increasingly strategic priority. Africa offers research and education communities with unique biological, environmental, geological, anthropological, and cultural resources. Research challenges in atmospheric and geosciences, materials sciences, tropical diseases, biology, astronomy, and other disciplines will benefit by enhancing the technological and social connections between the research and education communities of the U.S., Brazil / Latin America, and Africa. For many years, we have seen the dramatic benefits of high-performance networking in all areas of science and engineering. The Americas Africa Research and eduCation Lightpaths (AARCLight) project (NSF OAC-1638990) provided support for a grant to plan, design, and define a strategy for high capacity research and education network connectivity between the U.S. and West Africa. The study indicated a high level of enthusiasm to engage in collaborative research between the U.S., Brazil, and the African communities. There is collaborative interest in sharing network infrastructure resources in the US at AMPATH in Miami, in Fortaleza and Sao Paulo, Brazil where RedClara and ANSP connect at SouthernLight, and in Cape Town, South Africa. There is strong evidence of multiple ongoing domain science projects between the U.S., Brazil, and Africa that would benefit from a new South Atlantic link. The results of this planning grant successfully supported the need to light a 100G pathway using the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) connecting to AmLight-ExP in Fortaleza, Brazil, and via the West African Cable System (WACS) cable to the Cape Town, South Africa open exchange point. Based on these findings, AmLight-ExP , a high-performance R&E network supported by a consortium of participants and funding from the NSF is the steward of the SACS 100G link. With collaborative support from UbuntuNet Alliance, RNP, SANReN, and others, AmLight is taking steps to make this first South Atlantic R&E network path available to connect all three continents. This critical infrastructure establishes a new South Atlantic route to integrate with AmLight-ExP, adding resiliency to the global R&E network fabric by adding a new path to Africa and Europe from the southern hemisphere. The SACS cable, shown on Figure 1 as a purple dashed line between Fortaleza, Brazil, and Luanda, Angola, is the first east - west subsea cable in the South Atlantic. We will leverage network infrastructure in the southern hemisphere that is available to the R&E community including spectrum on Monet committed to the AmLight-ExP linking Miami, Fortaleza, and São Paulo; a 100G Ethernet link on SACS; TENET’s capacity on WACS; the R&E exchange point in Cape Town-ZAOXI operated by SANReN (South African National Research Network) and TENET connected to WACS and the Ubuntunet Alliance Network connecting East Africa; and the South America eXchange R&E exchange point (SAX) in Fortaleza, operated by RNP and connected via AmLight-ExP via Monet to São Paulo and Miami. The paper will present 1) the key partners in the AmLight-SACS collaboration, 2) the activation plan, 3) how the network will be instrumented for performance measurements, and to capture data for network analytics, and 4) science drivers that will benefit from the use of a South Atlantic network route between the U.S., South America, and West Africa. 

To interconnect research facilities across wide geographic areas, network operators deploy science networks, also referred to as Research and Education (R&E) networks. These networks allow experimenters to establish dedicated network connections between research facilities for transferring large amounts of data. Recently, R&E networks have started using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Exchanges (SDX) for deploying these connections. AtlanticWave/SDX is a response to the growing demand to support end-to-end network services spanning multiple SDN domains. However, requesting these services is a challenging task for domain-expert scientists, because the interfaces of the R&E networks have been developed by network operators for network operators. In this paper, we propose interfaces that allow domain expert scientists to reserve resources of the scientific network using abstractions that focus on their data transfer needs for scientific workflow management. Recent trends in the networking field pursue better interfaces for requesting network services (e.g., intent-based networking). Although intents are sufficient for the needs of network operations, they are not abstract enough in most cases to be used by domain-expert scientists. This is an issue we are addressing in the AtlanticWave/SDX design: network operators and domain-expert scientists will have their own interfaces focusing on their specific needs. 

Poster Abstract: To interconnect research facilities across wide geographic areas, network operators deploy science networks, also referred to as Research and Education (R&E) networks. These networks allow experimenters to establish dedicated network connections between research facilities for transferring large amounts of data. Recently, R&E networks have started using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Exchanges (SDX) for deploying these connections. AtlanticWave/SDX is a response to the growing demand to support end-to-end network services spanning multiple SDN domains. However, requesting these services is a challenging task for domain-expert scientists, because the interfaces of the R&E networks have been developed by network operators for network operators. In this paper, we propose interfaces that allow domain expert scientists to reserve resources of the scientific network using abstractions that focus on their data transfer needs for scientific workflow management. Recent trends in the networking field pursue better interfaces for requesting network services (e.g., intent-based networking). Although intents are sufficient for the needs of network operations, they are not abstract enough in most cases to be used by domain-expert scientists. This is an issue we are addressing in the AtlanticWave/SDX design: network operators and domain expert scientists will have their own interfaces focusing on their specific needs. 

The SDN paradigm enables network operators to host multiple control planes in parallel, being an approach to support multiple network services. Supporting multiple control planes over production networks exposes the production environment to potential risks and increases operational complexity. To understand and mitigate these risks, we implemented procedures and tools that resulted in a more reliable network. This paper describes our experience and findings with the support of multiple control planes in a wide-area production network. 

Science is being conducted in an era of information abundance. The rate at which science data is generated is increasing, both in volume and variety. This phenomenon is transforming how science is thought of and practiced. This transformation is being shaped by new scientific instruments that are being designed and deployed that will dramatically increase the need for large, real-time data transfers among scientists throughout the world. One such instrument is the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) being built in South Africa that will transmit approximately 160Gbps of data from each radio dish to a central processor. This paper describes a collaborative effort to respond to the demands of big data scientific instruments through the development of an international software defined exchange point (SDX) that will meet the network provisioning needs for science applications. This paper discusses the challenges of end-to-end path provisioning across multiple research and education networks using OpenFlow/SDN technologies. Furthermore, it refers to the AtlanticWave-SDX, a project at Florida International University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), along with support from Brazil’s NREN, Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP, and the Academic Network of Sao Paulo (ANSP). Future work explores the feasibility of establishing an SDX in West Africa, in collaboration with regional African RENs, based on the planned availability of submarine cable spectrum for use by research and education communities. 

New international academic collaborations are being created at a fast pace, generating data sets each day, in the order of terabytes in size. Often these data sets need to be moved in real-time to a central location to be processed and then shared. In the field of astronomy, building data processing facilities in remote locations is not always feasible, creating the need for a high bandwidth network infrastructure to transport these data sets very long distances. This network infrastructure normally relies on multiple networks operated by multiple organizations or projects. Creating an end-to-end path involving multiple network operators, technologies and interconnections often adds conditions that make the real-time movement of big data sets challenging. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an example of astronomical applications imposing new challenges on multi-domain network provisioning activities. The network for LSST is challenging for a number of reasons: (1) with the telescope in Chile and the archiving facility in the USA, the network has a high propagation delay, which affects traditional transport protocols performance; (2) the path is composed of multiple network operators, which means that the different network operating teams involved must coordinate technologies and protocols to support all parallel data transfers in an efficient way; (3) the large amount of data produced (12.7GB/image) and the small interval available to transfer this data (5 seconds) to the archiving facility requires special Quality of Service (QoS) policies; (4) because network events happen, the network needs to be prepared to be adjusted for rainy days, where some data types will be prioritized over others. To guarantee data transfers will happen within the required interval, each network operator in the path needs to apply QoS policies to each of its network links. These policies need to be coordinated end-to-end and, in the case where the network is affected by parallel events, all policies might need to be dynamically reconfigured in real-time to accommodate specific QoS policies for rainy days. Reconfiguring QoS policies is a very complex activity to current network protocols and technologies, sometimes requiring human intervention. This presentation aims to share the efforts to guarantee an efficient network configuration capable of handling LSST data transfers in sunny and rainy days across multiple network operators from South to North America.