IS&T Data Center MIT Optical Network
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• MIT’s Information Services and Technology (IS&T) department is MIT’s central information services organization. Operates all MIT core systems:
– Administrative: SAP, Data Warehouse
– Course Support: Stellar, MITsis/WebSIS
– Networks: Email, Web, VoIP, Athena, etc
• At MIT, DataSpace Production hardware and software proposed will be operated by IS&T staff
– Note: DataSpace nodes at partner organizations might be operated differently – to experiment with a variety of operating environments.
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• MIT’s IS&T department currently supports over 100 computer clusters from manufacturers such as Sun, Dell, Apple, and Hewlett-
Packard ranging in size from several computers up to hundreds of computers.
– Limited storage (approximately 1 TB) will be needed for local processing at the control node, and storage will be maintained for some research databases for testing purposes.
– MIT IS&T will also be able to host processing nodes for individual research projects on a contract basis should individual faculty at MIT or elsewhere desire this type of “co-location” service.
• Most of the collaborating research groups (i.e., the Martinos
Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute of MIT and the Center for
Advanced Brain Imaging at Georgia Tech) have computing, storage, and networks resources of their own.
– Since the funding and operation of these facilities are pre-existing and they have been partly described in the Project Description section, we will not elaborate upon them here – other than to note that they will be incorporated into the federated architecture of DataSpace.
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• Each computer in the DataSpace central node cluster will have two or more network connections to the internal network of the MIT data center.
• The data center’s internal network allows multiple sub-nets each operating at
1Gb/second connecting with MIT’s backbone network currently operating at
10Gb/second.
– Planned upgrades during the life of the NSF contract will raise these speeds to
10Gb/second and 40Gb/second respectively.
• Each sub-net can be configured with several “virtual networks” should our research indicate that isolation of network traffic between or among different servers is desirable.
• The internal MIT network connects to the Internet through multiple paths including Internet 2, NLR, three different commercial ISPs, through a common network ring among other universities in the Boston area, and via MIT’s optical network to a major Internet interconnection point in New York City.
– Aggregate capacity from MIT to the Internet is 40Gb/second with upgrades planned to ensure that average load is never more than 10% of capacity.
• During the life of this contract, it will be possible to have a dedicated connection from the DataSpace control node at MIT to Internet 2 and other external networks at speeds of 10-40Gb/second. These speeds will allow direct data transfers of sizable databases as well as all control information to manage a distributed worldwide network.
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• All hardware will be housed in MIT’s advanced data center with redundant power and cooling designed to meet specifications for Tier II (N+1) standards of the Up-time
Institute.
– MIT also maintains long-term leased space in a commercial Tier III data center (expected site availability of 99.982%) where redundant
DataSpace equipment can also be located.
– In addition, we expect to locate reduced capacity redundant hardware and software at another MIT-leased site at least 100 miles distant from the primary site.
• Software configuration will allow dynamic designation of additional control nodes so that control nodes can be designated at non-MIT sites.
– Control data will be replicated in real-time with a target replication delay of no more than two seconds among all control nodes. Fail-over will be based on standard “heart-beat” control protocols with transfer of control in less than two seconds and with no expected loss of control data.
– Control data will be archived analytical purposes.
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