The StarLight International/National Software Defined Networking Exchange (SDX) focuses on research, development, and deployment of services, architectures, and technologies designed to provide scientists, engineers, and educators with highly advanced, diverse, reliable, persistent, and secure networking services, enabling them to optimally send and receive large datasets between laboratories and major high-performance computing sites around the world.

The StarLight SDX initiative supports continued innovation and development of advanced networking services and technologies, particularly for data-intensive science. It expands upon existing and emerging experimental and prototype SDN/SDX/SDI networking architectures and technologies through the development of advanced communication services, in part, by leveraging existing designs and developments, by collaborating with many domain-science and computer-science research and education (R&E) communities and open exchanges worldwide, and by investigating, experimenting with, demonstrating, and prototyping new innovations that can contribute to these communities.

The StarLight SDX initiative focuses on three main activities: (1) designing and implementing the StarAX (StarLight Advanced eXchange) Innovation Engine to ensure that SDX facilities worldwide are compatible and interoperable; (2) deploying instances of this system at the StarLight facility; and, (3) coordinating and collaborating with global partners to deploy such systems at their exchange points.

In essence, the StarLight SDX facility serves as an incubator for new services and technologies that, when proven through experiments, trials, and demonstrations, are migrated to advanced R&E production facilities worldwide. Innovations are transformative, providing these facilities with new capabilities for service customization that benefit global domain science teams.

The International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, the Calit2-Qualcomm Institute (Calit2-QI) at University of California at San Diego, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago are undertaking this SDX development project in partnership with research organizations, advanced R&E Networks, R&E Open Exchanges, and science communities around the world (see Partners).

StarLight SDX NEWS