Oct 30, 2024

CENIC AIR and Your Campus: From Concept to Connection

More and more CENIC member institutions are connecting to the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR) in order to facilitate research and education into AI, machine learning, and data-driven science for their faculty, researchers, and students—including the first of California’s 73 community college districts to participate, the San Diego Community College District.

Other campuses are in the process of connecting to CENIC AIR, be they in the early fact-finding, planning, or implementation stages, and experts at already connected institutions are eager to share the lessons they’ve learned from their experiences. One treasure trove of information for curious campus leaders took place during the 2024 CENIC Biennial Conference “The Right Connection,” titled Bootstrapping Cyberinfrastructure in the CSU.

Between that panel discussion and the experiences of other campuses in various stages of connection, some important considerations have made themselves evident for senior leaders and IT directors at campuses that are considering taking advantage of what CENIC AIR has to offer their faculty, researchers, and students.

Building Bridges between Faculty and Campus IT

One significant piece of advice that all experts agree on is the importance of bringing faculty members and IT directors together at the same table and participating in the same conversation early on. During the conference panel mentioned above, Gerard Au (Chief Information Officer, CSU San Bernardino), Mike Farley (Chief Technology Officer for Research, SDSU), and Haley Ye (Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, CSU Stanislaus) all emphasized that, prior to preparing for the CSU’s multi-campus Technology Infrastructure for Data Exploration (TIDE) project, the IT situation for faculty, students, and the campuses themselves was sometimes “fragmented,” in Farley’s words.

Indeed, researchers frequently created their own unique IT systems in isolation from one another and campus IT, with all of the potential for security or other operational issues that entails. This can create complex situations for campus IT leadership, given that many students and faculty originally operated under the old misconception that campus IT services was simply the help desk to call when things didn’t work. This disconnect between faculty and campus IT often went both ways as Ye described, stating that campus IT was often more focused on teaching and administrative uses rather than researchers.

To forestall this, panelists and leaders at campuses currently in the process of connecting to CENIC AIR all agree that bringing everyone together to discuss research and education needs and campus IT infrastructure as a whole spurs conversations that ensure the success of both the TIDE project and CENIC AIR. The trendsetting CSU San Bernardino in fact created its High Performance Computing (HPC) program to meet precisely this need.

Understanding Your Faculty’s IT Needs

Another important part of this initial step to CENIC AIR participation is a formal survey of faculty IT needs, both for research and instructional uses. CSU San Bernardino is once again an excellent example of how to approach this problem, as described by its Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Sam Sudhakar: “It all starts with a strong relationship with the faculty.” Following this principle, CSU San Bernardino began working with the National Research Platform* (NRP) and a subset of faculty members, in effect creating a pilot for their HPC program.

This carefully planned pilot, driven by survey information, went very well, and its success encouraged the pilot faculty members to act as very effective word-of-mouth advocates to their colleagues. The campus’ HPC program now includes many more faculty members and disciplines and is an excellent example of the importance of understanding and supporting faculty-led innovation and making the right conversations happen at the outset.

* NRP has received support as part of National Science Foundation (NSF) awards CNS-1730158, ACI-1540112, ACI-1541349, OAC-1826967, OAC-2112167, CNS-2100237, and CNS-2120019

Evaluating Campus Network Connection Options

Connecting to CENIC AIR is more than a matter of bandwidth, though. These connections will be used to access and transfer enormous amounts of data in what is referred to as “hot” storage—data not merely stored for archival or backup purposes but accessed and manipulated frequently. This kind of traffic can tax a campus firewall enough to render it useless, or simply swamp more numerous but smaller enterprise uses.

The solution to this issue, described by ESnet, is a Science DMZ, a kind of big-data carpool lane implemented adjacent to a campus’ network gateway router that allows this kind of heavy use to take place without impacting other enterprise-level campus network usage and to do so securely.

CENIC has developed several models for a campus Science DMZ, described by CENIC network architect Christopher Bruton in this CENIC AIR presentation, also from our 2024 conference.

In the case of a Science DMZ that supports participation in CENIC AIR, it must have high enough bandwidth to handle such usage plus connect to the global Internet for needed upgrades and patches. In CENIC terms, this translates to connections to both the High-Performance Research (HPR) and Digital California (DC) tiers of CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN).

However, there are several ways this kind of network border connection can be implemented, all of which CENIC’s engineering team is ready to discuss with interested CENIC members and assist them with implementation if needed.

Choosing the Science DMZ Model for Your Campus

The most critical question, and the starting point for any Science-DMZ-related discussion, is whether a given campus has BGP peering with CENIC; in other words, does the campus handle its own border routing for purposes of BGP configuration? If a campus already has a connection to CalREN-HPR, this will be the case, and such a campus will be able to select from any of the various Science DMZ options that CENIC offers. These include a virtual or physical Science DMZ on a campus border router, a dedicated Science DMZ switch managed by the campus that operates alongside its border router, or even a CENIC-managed network solution. (If a campus does not have an HPR connection yet still handles its own routing, it will need to connect to CalREN-HPR in order to take advantage of this tier’s higher bandwidth.)

If a campus does not have a BGP peering with CENIC, it can implement BGP or choose a CENIC-managed Science DMZ solution. As always, all interested CENIC member campuses are invited to discuss other options with CENIC.

Lowering Barriers to Entry and Finding Funding

One additional consideration to keep in mind when preparing to participate in CENIC AIR is the challenge of finding funding for cyberinfrastructure. Many grants, for example the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) grants or other planning grants, request examples of campus use. For campuses eager to participate in such use but thus far unable to, these requirements can present an intractable chicken-and-egg problem. They wish to empower their faculty with the compute, storage, and networking resources they need, but without ready-made examples of use they find it hard to obtain the funding needed to get the resources in the first place.

An interested campus can now hatch this egg by participating in CENIC AIR. By surveying its faculty needs, enabling conversations between faculty and campus IT specialists, and implementing a CENIC AIR Science DMZ, any campus that is connected to CalREN can avail itself of the compute and storage resources shared by other CENIC AIR (or NRP) participants, and even “burst” beyond its own Science DMZ should its local compute and storage resources become overtaxed. The bursting and distributed resource-sharing capability described here is precisely the kind of persuasive use example that makes for a successful grant application.

Since CENIC members are part of a cross-segmental, technology-focused research and education community, reaching beyond campus boundaries and starting conversations or even submitting grant applications with other campuses—or even with CENIC members from other member segments—is easier than it otherwise would be.

CENIC AIR: The Rising Tide that Lifts All CENIC Members

Thus, a campus previously confronted by a daunting barrier to entry into AI and machine learning research and education can not only find a solution to bringing these resources to campus but thanks to its membership in CENIC, may also find funding to obtain resources of its own, which it can then make available to other participants in CENIC AIR.

In effect, CENIC makes it possible for California’s research and education community to become its own rising tide that lifts all members’ boats.

Any campus leader who’d like to learn more about participating in CENIC AIR is encouraged to reach out to their contact in the CENIC Project Management Office, and those curious about NRP are always welcome to reach out to Tom DeFanti at tdefanti@cenic.org.

Save the Date for the Sixth National Research Platform Workshop:
January 28-30, 2025 in San Diego, CA

Join your colleagues at the 6NRP Workshop from Tuesday, January 28, to Thursday, January 30, 2025. This workshop will bring more than 100 representatives from NRP partners and many other institutions that support domain scientists, network and system administrators, and campus CIOs. Together, we will discuss the current state and future direction of NRP and explore opportunities for collaboration.

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