Hybrid Optical Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) Testbed Support Center (TSC)
What is HOPI?
The Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project is examining a hybrid of packet and circuit switched infrastructures and how to combine them into a coherent and scalable architecture for next generation networks. The HOPI testbed utilizes facilities from Internet2 and the National Lambda Rail (NLR) to model these future architectures. The goal in the next two to three years is to gain enough experience with hybrid infrastructures to understand next generation architectures.
What is the HOPI Testbed Support Center?
The Testbed Support Center is an initiative headed up by MAX in cunjunction with the North Carolina Reserach and Eduction Network (NCREN) and the Global Research Netwrok opertions Center at Indiana University (GRNOC). These three organizations work closely with Internet2 to identify, deploy, and evaluate technologies over the HOPI testbed that can provide new service capabilities, provide architectural insights for hybrid network operations and/or engineering, and adaptation of these new services to the applications that require them.
The Testbed Support Center will assist any participating institution with the technical tasks associated with porting applications to the HOPI environment. The TSC will provide assistance to modify software to take advantage of the hybrid (circuit) capabilities, analysis of applications software for potential improvments given new service capabilities, systems and engineering support to regional and campus personnel to assist in connectivity issues, and operational monitoring of the national and international reach of the services.
As the Research and Education community migrates towards advanced services networks that incorporate both packet and circuit switching capabilities, HOPI provides one of (if not the only) dynamically allocated national infrastructures for the develpment and maturation of these technologies.