MREN Mission

The Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) provides state-of-the art, high performance communication services implemented on advanced, innovative networking architecture, infrastructure, facilities, and technology to support leading-edge research and educational applications, especially data intensive sciences interconnecting highly distributed instrumentation and computational environments.

Description

MREN—Advanced Networking for Advanced Applications

The Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) was established on the premise that high performance communication services are a core foundation and enabling technology for research and education. MREN is a collaborative interdisciplinary, interorganizational, cooperative partnership. MREN, a seven state (upper mid-west) regional network, provides high-performance communication services implemented on advanced networking infrastructure to support leading-edge research and educational applications, especially large scale data intensive science (eScience) applications implemented on highly distributed ecosystems. These advanced applications have specialized requirements that give rise to networking challenges that motivate new innovations in communication services. The MREN consortium believes that its research community will continue to drive advanced networking technologies for the foreseeable future.

Research applications that utilize MREN include high energy physics, astronomy and astrophysics, high performance computing, bioinformatics, computational chemistry, fusion energy, synchrotrons, scientific visualization, advanced medical imaging, computer science, AI/ML/DP, and computational science, including research using testbeds. MREN provides direct access to remote scientific instrumentation, including those at national research labs and international sites.

MREN and the Next Generation Internet

The MREN community has been at the forefront of advanced networking technology development and implementation since its implementation. All information technologies require on-going renewal, and a wide range of initiatives have been established to ensure networking technologies continue to evolve. Collectively, several of these efforts have been referred to as the "Next Generation Internet." Currently, the network research community is engaged in multiple projects directed at creating innovative networks, including many supported by the National Science Foundations advanced networking initiatives and testbeds. Advanced networking initiatives involve a large community of researchers worldwide, including those from universities, commercial firms, research centers, national research networks and as well as government agencies. Standardization efforts are guided by various standards organizations including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, www.ietf.org), which provides for architectural frameworks. Several recent researched and development initiatives supported by MREN have focused on advanced optical networking, based on dynamic wavelength and L2 switching, and programmable networking based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the P4 programming language.

Early Formulation

In 1993, MREN was designed as one of the first "next generation Internet" projects; production began in 1994. As part of that project, MREN worked with Ameritech's Advanced Data Service organization and its Ameritech Public Data Network (APDN) to design, implement, and operation one of the world's first Internet exchanges, the Chicago Network Access Point (NAP). MREN's technical design has always been based on extensive analysis of multiple requirements of those leading-edge applications. MREN allows real-time, state-of-the art applications to actively use the latest, multi-site advanced networking technologies. MREN has been recognized as a prototype for the development and promotion of existing and future, digital, communication services, utilizing high performance networks. (For further information on MREN's early contributions to the development of the Internet, ref: "Next Generation Internet: Creating Advanced Networks and Services," Wiley Press, which includes a case study of MREN.

MREN related regional, national, and international projects range from designing and implementing new services, technologies and techniques aggressive bandwidth-utilizing applications to research and development. Many of these research and development projects center on advanced network architecture, methods, experimentation, and tools. These projects are undertaken with research partners world-wide. Increasingly, MREN is directly involved in the development of cyberinfrastructure, which employs innovative techniques combining advanced networking, high performance cluster computing, and other resources such as massive data repositories to provide powerful new capabilities for advanced applications -especially e-Science. Early efforts were related to MREN's support for the Grid and Globus communities, ref "The Grid: Blueprint for a Future Computing Infrastructure, Foster and Kesselman, Morgan Kaufmann Publisher" and "Grid Networks: Enabling Grids With Advanced Communications Technology, Wiley Publisher. More recent efforts relate to the Global Research Platform, the National Research Platform, the Asia-Pacific Research Platform, and related initiatives.

First Principles and Policies

First Principles -- The MREN Consortium:

• Believes that its research community will continue to drive advanced networking technologies for the foreseeable future.
• Is dedicated to maintaining its lead in advanced digital networking, in part, by developing innovative new networking designs, techniques, and technologies.
• Will continue to undertake research and development projects focused on advanced networking architecture and infrastructure.
• Will also undertake the development and promotion of existing and future application services utilizing high bandwidth, including integrated voice/video/data network services.
• Will continue to be deliberately organized to minimize administrative organizational structure.
• Will develop and sustain high-quality operations, including a NOC operation and advanced network management tools to ensure high quality reliable services.

Policies

The fundamental policies of MREN are based on the following four premises:

• All members support MREN's mission.
• MREN's vision will only succeed through a spirit of cooperative partnership. The advanced infrastructure requirements for the next generation networks, as well as detailed technical specifications, are in an on-going process of formulation. At any given stage, while some complex tasks are being accomplished, other difficult challenges emerge. The magnitude of these challenges are significant. There are many extremely complex tasks to overcome before this vision of a high performance flexible infrastructure can become a reality. The MREN community believes that these challenges will be overcome only through best cooperative efforts by the best networking experts within the research and education communities, with the assistance of their commercial partners.
• All members must be cooperative network citizens. MREN is managed as a cooperative shared resource for its member institutions and for its constituent communities. Through its governing committee it ensures that network resources are available to meet the requirements of its constituent communities. Through planning, priority setting and scheduling, these committees ensure that resources are not overly subscribed and that applications are not in conflict. Representative committee members are responsible for the compliance of their individual communities.
• All members must contribute to the cooperative technical management of the network through the MREN technical committee. For cost efficiency and to ensure close communication and cooperation, each member institution must provide the required technical resources, including network infrastructure and professional technical staff capable of supporting advanced networking -- ensuring that MREN continues to meet its technical infrastructure goals in developing and maintaining an advanced network that is highly reliable, modular, secure, standards based, scaleable, and manageable at all technical layers.

Membership and Governance

Membership

MREN is a cooperative partnership, consisting of a consortium of organizations that undertakes mutually beneficial projects in order to provide advanced networking services and infrastructure to its constituencies. One of the defining principals of MREN is that its membership believes in supporting advanced applications with advanced networking as a priority - not as a secondary consideration. These organizations believe in providing the highest level of quality services to their constituencies. Many of these organizations have been working together on advanced networking initiatives since the early days of the first upper-midwest regional Internet, which provided connectivity to the national NSFnet. To some degree, MREN is a next generation regional advanced network, linking organizations throughout the seven states of the upper midwest. However, MREN membership extends to many other organizations that share the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in networking. Consequently, its membership also includes international advanced networking research organizations, federal agency networks, state-wide networks, and corporate research labs. It is notable that MREN, unlike some other networking organizations, does not define its members by infrastructure - particular types of network connections or network subscription service. As an infrastructure, MREN has always been a network of networks, and, consequently, its organizations are interlinked by multiple transit providers.

MREN accepts as members institutions with which the current organizations have shared objectives, especially those based on collaborative research projects that require advanced networking. Acceptance as an member requires 1) agreement to such an acceptance by the MREN members, 2) agreement by proposed members to adhere to MREN's core policies and principles, 3) requisite infrastructure, and 4) the contribution of management capabilities and technical support to meet the institutional requirements of the proposed member and to assist, in a modest measure, with general MREN management. It is expected that the majority of members will be research universities (R1), research laboratories, advanced research network organizations, corporate research centers and related institutions that require high performance networking support for advanced applications.

To provide a means for corporations to participate in MREN research and development projects, the Enterprise Research and Education Network program has been established as an MREN project. Participating corporations must be sponsored by an MREN member organization, adhere to MREN policies and procedures, and use the provided network connectivity only for research and development rather than for commercial purposes. As noted, MREN's seven-state infrastructure is provided by many different communications organizations. Beyond working cooperatively to provide advanced communication services, MREN is working with multiple providers on ongoing, mutually beneficial, cooperative research and development efforts related to high performance interorganizational networking. MREN also works in close partnership with corporate research and development organizations and technical staff who have expertise in advanced applications. These activities include technical meetings and joint projects centering on advanced technologies, new services, interoperability testing and performance evaluation, routing schemes, emerging technologies and services, including those based on advanced optical networks, migration strategies, inter-LATA services, links to testbed networks, and connectivity to gigabit and multi-gigabit networks.

Governance

MREN is a consortium that is governed by its members through an executive committee and a technical committee. As an organization, MREN has been deliberately designed to minimize administrative organizational structure and to optimize quick decision making and progress.

MREN policy formulation is undertaken in consultation with its constituent community, especially research scientists. Like the IETF, which believes in "rough consensus and running code," MREN places a high value on rapid deployment.

MREN was originally developed by its charter members: the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Northwestern University, and Ameritech Advanced Data Services. These organizations were joined by CANARIE, the Canadian research and education network (the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University of Wisconsin (Madison and Milwaukee), the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of Minnesota, MERIT, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Notre Dame, the Ohio Academic Research Network (OARnet, includes Ohio State University), Indiana University, Purdue University, the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, De Paul University, Bradley University, Loyola University of Chicago, Northern Illinios University, the Illinois Century Network, WiscNet, Southern Illinois University, and Illinois State University. Other members are NGI network entities, such as NREN (NASA, NISN), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), ESnet, USLHCnet and DREN (DoD). The European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN), SURFnet, APAN, and SingAREN are also members. .

Executive Committee

The Executive Committee, Chaired by MREN's Director is the network's management committee, responsible for overall policy formulation, strategic planning and implementation, and project development. This Committee consists of Joe Mambretti (MREN Director, and Director, International Center for Advanced Internet Research, Northwestern), Linda Winkler (Technical Director of MREN, Argonne National Laboratory), Corby Schmitz  (ANL), Phil Demar (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), Will Marcyniuk (University of Illinois, Chicago), Matt Wilson (Northwestern University), Tim Boerner (NCSA), and Ryan Harden (University of Chicago).

Technical Committee

 The MREN Technical Committee, chaired by the MREN Technical Director, guides the MREN research and development projects as well as the many of the other aspects of MREN technical operations.

The Technical Director works with MREN charter and associate members and collaborators to research, define, design, develop, and enhance advanced network infrastructure and services that meet the requirements of the MREN community and partner constituencies. The Technical Director leads a standing group of technical experts and oversees ad hoc project committees, which undertake cooperative projects, including the exploration and demonstration of leading edge technologies that enable applications to be accomplished through advanced networking across a wide range of disciplines, especially science, computational research, engineering, and education.

The Technical Director, in conjunction with these committees, leads efforts in the design and implementation of the overall architecture, in methods for achieving optimal network performance, including networking on specific sites, and planning for and implementing new connections. The MREN Technical Director ensures that the MREN community continues to prepare for future requirements by enabling network researchers to have access to infrastructure and technologies capable of performing advanced network research. In part, this is accomplished through experimentation with advanced applications necessary for testing and stressing new technologies.

© 2010 by MREN

12.01.10