Design of a New Network Infrastructure using Routing Control Platform for the University of Huddersfield Campus Grid

Research across the University of Huddersfield has increased in terms of number of users utilising the cluster systems. These systems provide a valuable service allowing high speed, complex calculations and graphics rendering to be performed. The clusters have grown out of user requirements and the availability of computing and networking equipment. In the early days very little consideration was given to the placement of equipment to fulfil these needs. As a result the speed of data transmission was slow and often resulted in bottlenecking and/or data loss through protocol timeouts. An increase in bandwidth has helped to improve this, but more importantly the allocation of space within the data centre has enabled a significant increase in bandwidth, as well as providing a direct connection to the network backbone.

As a result of our work the network topology has changed and has reduced the number of switches and routers packets traverse across the network from end user to cluster. The knock-on effect is a reduction in data transmission times, a reduction in the possibility of bottlenecking and much reduced data loss.