CANARIE — DAIR Pilot Program

The DAIR Program serves the needs of both small and medium-sized companies as well as the research community in Canada. The objective in the initial phase was to significantly reduce the time required to design, prototype, validate and demonstrate new products and ideas particularly in large scale. It also reduced capital, space, power and people resources that each company would otherwise be required to provide over the course of the product development cycle.

DAIR added additional computing and storage resources to the existing CANARIE high-speed national network and make these resources available through the provincial networks (Optical Regional Advanced Networks, or ORANs). It provided additional network access mechanisms to allow users more flexible ways to access the R&D environment including WiFi, Macro Cellular and virtual private networks (VPNs) over the Internet.

Multiple simultaneous scenarios making use of these resources were supported with the aim of allowing scenarios to be set up within 10 minutes through a browser based user interface or through programmatic interfaces (APIs). It was effectively a cloud service to support development and testing activities, in which multiple users are provided with a partitioned environment with required resources available to them.

The requirements for the DAIR Program were developed as a result of consultations with a number of industry groups and ICT researchers in Canada.

Availability

The pilot phase of the Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) has come to a close. Thank you for your participation and interest in such a valuable program. We are evaluating the outcomes of the pilot program, and are in the process of gathering input from SMEs to help design the next phase of the program. Should the DAIR Program expand based on results of the pilot, there may be cost recovery fees applied. All inquiries should be directed to dair@canarie.ca. Please take the survey to help shape the next phase of the DAIR program.

Structure

The following diagram lays out the high-level structure of the DAIR pilot program.

SME = Small or Medium Enterprise
ORAN = Optical Regional Advanced Networks, such as Cybera in Alberta, BCNET in British Columbia or ORION in Ontario

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Organizations and individuals wishing to use the DAIR Program must first be authorized by CANARIE. Users will be connected into the system by VPNs either over the internet or via provincial network (ORAN) connectivity.

CANARIE is building two geographically separated nodes. Nodes are composed of 160 X86 compute cores with 20 TB of storage. The nodes have 10 GB interconnect with 1GB or better access to the CANARIE Canada-wide network.

The resources will be shared between organizations using cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) software. Authorized users will be able to upload their images to the “cloud” and create development and testing environments via web based interfaces or APIs. The environment is a set of images that are instantiated as a single operation on one or both nodes. Within the environment, all images will be connected to a VLAN that is dedicated to that environment to ensure that the environments are totally segregated. The goal is that images with interconnections can be instantiated in ten minutes or less. The VPN connection into DAIR will allow users full access to their environment including logging in, stopping, starting and restarting images and any other connectivity into the environment for purposes such as monitoring, statistics collection, or generating transactions.

WiFi access will be provided at selected University and College campuses. This will enable users accessing DAIR to use wireless devices to get access to their environments. A wireless device will be authenticated as username@dair.ca and will be connected into the appropriate environment VLAN. Note that wireless devices must support 802.1x EAP/PEAP based authentication. Users can add WiFi users/devices via a web interface.

3G and 4G wireless access will also be provided. The locations for this access will be determined by May 2011.

What Sorts of Products and Projects Could Benefit from the DAIR Program?

The DAIR Program is primarily aimed at products and projects that can leverage a highly scalable network and computing infrastructure. The examples below are not intended to limit in any way what people could use the system for but are used to illustrate how such projects could benefit from using the DAIR Program.

Software Application Examples:

• An application that employs a scalable server farm with clients accessing the farm over a network. A massively multi-player online game (MMO) could be an example of such an application as could telecom software such as billing or home subscriber server;
• Anything that requires high volume data collection, correlation and parallel processing;
• Transactional software such as e-banking; and
• Web based applications such as social networking.

The DAIR Program is not suitable for hard real-time applications such as video or audio conferencing. Virtualization will get in the way.

Machine-to-Machine Application Examples:

Sensors or other devices can be attached to the network via your own network infrastructure with a VPN connection into DAIR. Alternatively they can be deployed in multiple locations at universities and colleges via Wi-Fi and via 3G or 4G macro wireless access.

Wireless Application Examples:

• Standalone wireless applications can be connected into the 3G/4G macro or WiFi infrastructure.
• Wireless applications with network based server components.

 

The objective of CANARIE’s DAIR (Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research) Program is to significantly reduce the time and cost required for small and medium-sized high-tech companies to verify new technology products and ideas particularly in large scale. It will also reduce capital, space, power and people resources that each business or researcher would otherwise be required to provide themselves. The DAIR Program will allow collaboration between industry and the research community and provide market feedback from potential customers.

What it will be

The DAIR Program will:

• Be a large-scale testing and development environment built on the current CANARIE high-speed fibre-optic network.
• Be augmented by computing, storage and additional access technologies.
• Be designed such that the resources in DAIR can be shared between the users using cloud-computing technologies.
• Provide wireless and wireline access to DAIR applications from within universities

CANARIE will build test nodes at two locations. Test nodes will be composed of computing and storage resources with high-speed access to the CANARIE network. These resources would be virtualized and made available to testers via a “cloud” infrastructure.

Access to the test nodes will be provided via Virtual Private Networks, wireless access and wired access to any institution having access to provincial advanced network (ORAN) capacity. Other resources such as environmental sensors, cameras and other machine-to-machine equipment will also be available to testers via the wireless or wired access networks.

Who will build it?

The DAIR Program augments the existing CANARIE and provincial and territorial high-speed fibre-optic networks by adding computing and storage resources.

Who will use it?

There are three types of potential users:

• Near term: application and solution providers who are looking to have product deployed and generating revenue in a one-year time horizon.
• Medium term: product, application and solution providers who are targeting future network evolutions. In general, these are architectures that are defined but are still in development. For instance, consider a new two-way video application that requires end-to-end quality of service in a 4G LTE network running IPv6.
• Long term: companies and researchers who are developing next-generation networking. This could be advanced routing protocols, wireless mobility, modulation techniques, etc. These have 5 year plus timeframes for product deployment but need early validation of the technology before moving into a product development phase.

The pilot program focused on the near-term users.

When will it be in use?

• CANARIE announced the DAIR Program in December 2010.
• A smaller scale pilot project will be built in 2011 to prove the technology and the value to the Canadian technology community. If this demonstrates the expected benefits, then the DAIR Program would be expanded in 2012 and beyond.
• CANARIE is accepting proposals for DAIR in April 2011 and the first users will be on DAIR in May 2011. The pilot will run until March 2012.

Structure

The following diagram lays out the high-level structure of the DAIR pilot program.

SME = Small or Medium Enterprise
ORAN = Optical Regional Advanced Networks, such as Cybera in Alberta, BCNET in British Columbia or ORION in Ontario