Vanderbilt Professor of Physics Paul Sheldon heads a multi-institutional team that has received an Internet2 award for a networking system that they have developed to make it easier to move and store mountains of digital data.
The team received one of four 2010 IDEA awards given by Internet2, an advanced networking consortium led by the research and education community. The awards were selected by a committee of Internet2 members and were judged for their positive impact on users, technical merit and likelihood of adoption by the Internet2 community.
Sheldon and his colleagues were recognized for their development of the Research and Education Data Deport network (REDDnet) Data Logistics Toolkit and storage model. REDDnet is an infrastructure project funded by the National Science Foundation that provides a large distributed data storage facility to support collaboration among the nation’s researchers and educators in a wide variety of data-intensive applications, including high-energy physics. The toolkit provides a platform that allows researchers at different campuses to create “bridges” that let them exchange large amounts of data over the nation’s high-speed networks. The REDDnet model provides temporary “working storage” that makes it easier and faster to move and storage vast amounts of globally distributed data across a wide area network.
REDDnet collaborators include Sheldon; Alan Tackett, research professor of physics at Vanderbilt; John Cobb, R&D staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Micah Beck, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Terry Moore, associate director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Martin Swany, professor of computer science and information sciences at the University of Delaware; and P.R. Blackwell, director of Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center at Stephen F. Austin State University.
Additional information about the Internet2 IDEA Awards can be found at www.internet2.edu/idea/ .
Contact: David F. Salisbury, (615) 322-NEWS
david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu