The Pacific Research Platform

Abstract

While NSF's recent Campus Cyberinfrastructure investments have catalyzed an enormous leap in campus networking capabilities, it remains necessary to integrate these capabilities into the routine workflows of researchers transferring data among their remote collaborators, data repositories, and visualization facilities. The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) is a program to develop a science-driven, data-centric "freeway system" by federating campus Science DMZs into a regional Science DMZ. Research collaborations across PRP partners serve as use cases for deploying the hardware/software and addressing security/policy/social issues to achieve high-performance data transfers between researchers. The regional PRP represents a manageable scale for initial deployment efforts and capturing lessons learned, but the PRP also informs national deployments --i.e., an eventual National Research Platform (NRP). The recent First NRP Workshop included many campuses and networking organizations and addressed scientific requirements, scaling approaches, and socio-technical issues to extend the PRP to a national level; a second NRP Workshop will be held in August 2018. In this paper, we describe efforts to build the PRP, the social and technical approaches, the domain science applications of PRP's capabilities, and results of the recent NRP workshop.