Faculty Spotlight: Thinking in Terabits

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Wondering why you can't transfer that gigantic file over your current computer network? There are solutions in the works, and ECE Professor Nasir Ghani is holding some of the keys. When Ghani thinks of speed, he thinks in gigabits and terabits—per second that is. With the help of funding from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, he's working to enable interconnectivity on a massive scale between users spread out across the globe. The primary target audience here is the scientific research community, which relies on networking to share research data and findings.

Dr. Nasir Ghani

As with the original Internet in the 1970s, scientific research is currently a prime driver of data exchange. Some key "e-science" research areas today include high-energy physics, astronomy, genomics and climate-change modeling. With increased computing power and powerful instrumentation, research data-sets are becoming gargantuan in size, readily up to petabytes and even exabytes.

Take for example an exabyte, which is equal to one quintillion bytes, a value most of us do not routinely think of—10 to the 18th power. Beginning in 2015, scientists expect the Square Kilometre Array telescope (being proposed for Australia or South Africa) to generate one terabyte of data per minute. In just four days this facility could generate an exabyte of data to be transferred across the globe.

To address these data-transfer challenges, Ghani is working on the very lowest layers of the network—the plumbing itself—to help speed the transfer of massive quantities of data. A key goal here is to leverage new optical technologies to achieve desired scalability, while extracting more performance and reliability out of existing network investments. This approach is intended to provide a streamlined and cost-effective means for the scientific community to transition and support its mission-critical needs.

Members of Dr. Ghani's High-Speed Networks Lab are (l. to r.) Mostafa Esmaeili, Feng (Stephen) Xu, Dr. Ghani and Chongyang (Kevin) Xie.

In his High-Speed Networks Lab in ECE 235A, Ghani and his students are conducting advanced performance evaluation studies to predict how various combinations of network technologies—IP, SONET, and optical—can interact to transfer super-massive amounts of data. This work will enable them to accurately predict the operation of large-scale national and global networks, well beyond what can be achieved without access to expansive real-world test beds. Ghani is working closely with the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute East and Internet 2 in this effort. Internet2 is a consortium of universities, corporations and government agencies that share a high-speed backbone for research collaboration purposes.

Ghani envisions an end-to-end solution in which advanced provisioning software will operate across hybrid domains and networking layers to provision "multi-service" user needs. Along these lines he is developing unified architectures and control solutions for dynamic peering/interoperation between Internet packet-switching and optical circuit-switching domains.

An associate professor with ECE, Ghani has made strong contributions to the telecommunications field, particularly in the areas of optical network interfacing and traffic engineering. Most notably, he has worked on developing comprehensive, standardized control architectures and algorithms for modern transport networks. For his work this area, he earned the NSF Career Award in 2005.

As a senior member of IEEE, Ghani has published extensively in the networking area and holds two patents. His most recent publications include co-authorship of the text Delivering Carrier Ethernet: Extending Ethernet Beyond the LAN, (McGraw Hill Publishers, October 2007) and a paper titled "Control Plane Design in Multi-Domain/Multi-Granularity Optical Networks" in the June 2008 issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine.

In addition to his research, Ghani is actively involved in many organizational and outreach activities. He has co-chaired numerous international conferences and is organizing a workshop on high-speed networks at IEEE INFOCOM in April 2009. Ghani also serves as an editor of various IEEE journal publications and was elected chair of the IEEE's Technical Committee on High-Speed Networks, where his is responsible for various member initiatives and outreach activities. As part of his role as an educator at UNM, Ghani has also held various networking seminars for area high-school teachers during ECE's annual open-house events.

Ghani earned his PhD at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1997. Besides an earlier position on the faculty at Tennessee Tech University, Ghani's experience includes more than eight years in industry, including work as a systems analyst at IBM, senior design engineer at Motorola, senior research engineer at Nokia, and a senior product architect at Sorrento Networks.

Ghani can be reached at 505-277-1475 or by e-mail at nghani-at-ece-dot-unm-dot-edu. His website is here.