Acting ESnet Director Inder Monga gave a keynote talk on “NDN for Big Data” to open the second day of a workshop on Named Data Networking (NDN) held May 31-June 1 in Gaithersburg, Md.

According to the workshop website, NDN is a new architecture that would address ongoing challenges in supporting modern applications with IP, especially in networks of diverse and intermittent links. NDN would bring Web-like semantics to the network layer, directly supporting dissemination of named, signed data. This would allow users to find data they are interested based on the name of the data, rather than having to specify a host site by its numerical IP address.

Monga’s talk looked at big data science and how NDN could be used for “intelligent data transfers,” especially when used with ESnet’s OSCARS, the On Demand Secure Circuits and Reservation System software. ESnet’s work in NDN dates back to 2012 when Susmit Shannigrahi, a Ph.D. student at Colorado State University (CSU), was a network intern. ESnet also operates an NDN testbed in collaboration with Christos Papadopoulos at CSU.

Held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the workshop brought together representatives from industry, government and academia to discuss the role that the NDN future internet architecture can play in support of these critical network environments, as well as future content delivery over mobile networks.