In The News

SDRC Receives Grant to Develop End-to-End MPLS-GMPLS Networks for the U.S. Department of Energy

Argon ST, Inc. to Acquire SDRC

SAN DIEGO, California, (July 26, 2006) - San Diego Research Center, Inc. (SDRC), a leader in wireless network research and system development in the defense sector, has been awarded an SBIR grant worth $99,975.00 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop end-to-end multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) networks. SDRC's work will further the capabilities of DOE's broad-based networking cyber-infrastructures like Ultra-Science Net (USN) and Energy Sciences Net (ESN).

In Phase 1, SDRC begins nine months of developing end-to-end provisioning architectures and algorithms for the MPLS-GMPLS networks. This work addresses a major need of the DOE community by formulating and studying the architectures and algorithms needed to achieve large-scale "distance-agnostic" research modeling/computing capabilities. With subsequent efforts, these architectures and algorithms will be adapted into industry-grade software management packages, paving the way for automated inter-domain provisioning of both multi-gigabit (multi-lambda, lambda) and finer-precision sub-gigabit connections, i.e., with immediate and advance reservation. According to Dr. Bo Ryu, Director of SDRC's Networking and Systems Research Group, "These solutions will reduce related provisioning times from weeks-days down to minutes-seconds, a significant advance. In the end, this will allow DOE researchers to experiment with many new applications requiring synchronized terabyte transfers and remote steering capabilities. Moreover, the longer term benefits will extend well beyond the DOE to other research organizations-governmental, private, international-and help accelerate global scientific collaborations."

DOE's vanguard research in high-energy physics, climate modeling, environmental monitoring, and grid-computing will be increasingly dependent upon distributed computing paradigms with datasets exceeding terabyte and petabyte levels. As research efforts intensify, remote information access and distribution across extended wide area distances is becoming a growing necessity which is vital for maintaining large-scale collaborations between dispersed scientific teams. This trend is pushing the need for next-generation networking infrastructures and imposing new challenges for dynamic bandwidth allocation across multiple domains and technologies . As this infrastructure starts to mature and evolve, many exciting applications are being envisioned, posing new challenges for the networking layer, the solutions to which will pave the way for much-improved future capabilities.

About the SBIR Program: The Department of Defense (DoD) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs fund a billion dollars each year in early-stage R&D projects at small technology companies - projects that serve a DoD need and have commercial applications. SBIR and STTR funds are awarded competitively and small companies retain the intellectual property rights to technologies they develop under these programs.

About SDRC: SDRC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Argon ST, is a wireless technology and system development company focusing on challenging and important problems in wireless waveform and media access control (MAC) network protocol development.

Media Contact: Ted Balleras (858) 623-9424 ext. 408 or ted.balleras@argonst.com