Dynamic Network Provisioning for Data Intensive Applications in the Cloud

Advanced networks are an essential element of data-driven science enabled by next generation cyberinfrastructure environments. Computational activities increasingly incorporate widely dispersed resources with linkages among software components spanning multiple sites and administrative domains. We have seen recent advances in enabling on-demand network circuits in the national and international backbones coupled with Software Defined Networking (SDN) advances like OpenFlow and programmable edge technologies like OpenStack. These advances have created an unprecedented opportunity to enable complex scientific applications to run on specially tailored, dynamic infrastructure that include compute, storage and network resources, combining the performance advantages of purpose-built infrastructures, but without the costs of a permanent infrastructure. This work presents an experience deploying scientific work-flows on the ExoGENI national test bed that dynamically allocates computational resources with high-speed circuits from backbone providers. Dynamically allocated bandwidth-provisioned high-speed circuits increase the ability of scientific applications to access and stage large data sets from remote data repositories or to move computation to remote sites and access data stored locally. The remainder of this extended abstract is a brief description of the test bed and several scientific workflow applications that were deployed using bandwidth-provisioned high-speed circuits.