10 really cool university networking labs

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SUBHED: Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
Created:
Location:
Why it’s cool:
Current projects:
More on the lab:

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab 

Created: 2003
Location: Corvallis, Ore.
Why it's cool: Hosts some of the best known open source projects such as the Linux kernel, Drupal, the Apache Software Foundation and more than 50 others. Provides open source development resources and industry events such as the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON). Funded entirely by individual and corporate donations.
Current projects: Developing and hosting the Oregon Virtual School District (K-12 online learning portal). New hosted partners include yum, RPM and the Linux Foundation.

The National Center for Data Mining at UIC 

Created: 1998
Location: University of Illinois at Chicago campus in Chicago
Why it's cool: NCDM develops open source technologies that allow scientists, who are not necessarily computer experts, to store, distribute and analyze datasets that are terabytes in size or larger using big numbers of commodity computers and high-speed wide-area networks. For example, NCDM developed UDT, a protocol that allows data to be transferred at 8Gbps (disk to disk) from the United States. to Japan. It also designed a cloud computing system called Sector/Sphere that is at least twice as fast as Hadoop as measured by the Terasort benchmark.

For each of the past four years, the NCDM has won a major award at the SC XY technical workshops on supercomputing. At SC 08, Sector and the Open Cloud Testbed won the Bandwidth Challenge. NCDM developed and runs the Teraflow Testbed for networking research and is a founding member of the Open Cloud Consortium.

NCDM's philosophy is to show that distributed computing and high-speed networking can be made as simple as possible, with a lightweight, easy-to-use infrastructure.

Current projects: At SC 08 in November, the NCDM won the Bandwidth Challenge using Sector, Sphere and the Open Cloud Testbed. NCDM demonstrated technology for the first time that enables cloud computing to utilize high-performance networks and spread cloud computing across data centers to create wide-area clouds. One application, dubbed TeraSort, involved sorting 1 terabyte of data in 30 minutes, with the average data moving rate of about 4.8Gbps, with a peak speed reaching 10Gbps.