KNOXVILLE — Two University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers have been awarded the 2010 Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Award for their work in developing a network storage infrastructure that will aid the nation’s researchers and educators in transferring large amounts of data and research quickly and easily for collaboration.
Micah Beck, an electrical engineering and computer science professor, and Terry Moore, associate director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL), developed the Education Data Depot network (REDDnet) Data Logistics Toolkit which is a model for storage facilities supporting data‐intensive collaboration.
Beck and Moore collaborated on the project with Paul Sheldon, professor of physics and director of the Vanderbilt Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University; Martin Swany, professor of computer science and information sciences at the University of Delaware; and P.R. Blackwell, director of the Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center at Stephen F. Austin State University. Faculty, students and research staff at UT Knoxville also have been developing REDDnet for the past decade.
REDDnet is a National Science Foundation‐funded infrastructure project that provides a large storage facility for data‐intensive collaboration among the nation’s researchers and educators in a wide variety of application areas including high‐energy physics. In essence, it provides a platform in which institutions can create bridges for data sharing and collaboration on large-scale projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator in Switzerland.
“The REDDnet model provides ‘working storage’ to help manage the logistical factors in
moving and staging large amounts of data across the wide area network — not just fast
transport, but enormous data volumes, globally distributed data, asynchronous data
access and data preprocessing,” Beck said.
The researchers are among four Internet2 IDEA Award winners. The IDEA Awards program recognizes innovative advanced network applications that have had the most positive impact within the research and education community. Each application was nominated by a member of the Internet2 community and judged by a member-based committee.
Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. By bringing research and academia together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community, Internet2 promotes collaboration and innovation that has a fundamental impact on the future of the Internet.
ICL is part of the electrical engineering and computer science department in the College of Engineering at UT Knoxville and serves as the cornerstone laboratory of the Center for Information Technology Research (CITR), one of UT’s nine Centers of Excellence.
—
C O N T A C T :
Whitney Holmes (865-974-5460, wholmes7@utk.edu)