Scientific research is increasingly relying on complex workflows that span multiple computing paradigms, including high-performance computing (HPC), high-throughput computing (HTC), and machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI). Traditional monolithic computing infrastructures often struggle to accommodate these diverse and evolving demands. The Reconfigurable Advanced Platform for Transdisciplinary Open Research (RAPTOR) addresses this challenge by providing a dynamically reconfigurable computing environment that integrates with federated resources. RAPTOR's architecture enables dynamic provisioning between an HPC cluster and the Chameleon Cloud platform based on workload requirements, supporting bare-metal customization for specialized applications. This paper focuses on RAPTOR's reconfigurability features and demonstrates their effectiveness through quantitative performance evaluations across four scientific domains: computational proteomics, climate modeling, weather research, and hurricane risk assessment. Our results demonstrate that RAPTOR's reconfigurable design significantly enhances research productivity by providing an appropriate computing environment for diverse computational needs.

Short-lived bursts of traffic, known as microbursts, can lead to packet drops, jitter, and performance degradation potentially impacting data transfers. Detecting microburst events on production networks is challenging due to the sub-second monitoring interval required and the amount of data produced. We propose an adaptive and efficient approach to detect and store microbursts leveraging In-band Network Telemetry (INT) and an enhanced telemetry collector capable of adapting its routines to the bandwidth utilization. Field trials demonstrated our capabilities to detect millisecond-based microbursts and an efficient persistence data gathering approach with data reduction above 60%, while preserving good levels of accuracy. Source code and measurement datasets are public.

Developing a distributed controller system for pro-duction software defined networks (SDN) requires substantial en-gineering effort to satisfy the stringent performance, adaptability, availability and security requirements that are well beyond the basic function development. The softwarization nature of SDN provides the opportunity to leverage the recent advancements in software engineering and system automation. In this paper we present our recent work to develop and deploy a wide-area SDN control framework prototype towards production deployment and operation. We primarily focus on three critical areas (1) enhancement of the software functions and the substrate virtualization configurations to fully support advanced connection services and fault tolerance in both data plane and control plane (2) a high-fidelity testing pipeline con-sisting of unit tests emulation and a testbed and (3) a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Our experience proved that the presented environment and process greatly increased the software quality and development efficiency which would ultimately lead to a reliable and continuous deploy-ment and automation of the targeted production SDN network.

Operating unprotected network links for international collaboration between research and education communities, subject to a high-availability production service requirement, is challenging. Provisioning circuits, maintaining a loop-free network topology, and configuring multipath redundancy to provide high availability are complex processes, which involve extensive coordination between, and manual configuration operations carried out by, multiple network operators, resulting in high operations costs. Moreover, network-oriented research applications increasingly require the capability to program network functions to satisfy particular requirements, such as high tolerance, low delay, end-to-end visibility, etc. We describe a solution, based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which significantly lowers the operations costs by automating most network operations and reducing coordination efforts between network operators. The design of the network, before and after SDN was deployed, is discussed. For each network function migrated to SDN, a comparative analysis is provided with metrics, first to represent real measurements before and after each SDN deployment scenario, and second, to describe findings of reduced operations costs.

The "CyberBridges" pilot project is an innovative model for creating a new generation of scientists and engineers who are capable of fully integrating cyberinfrastructure into the whole educational, professional, and creative process of their respective disciplines. CyberBridges augments graduate student education to include a foundation of understanding in advanced networking and grid infrastructure for high performance computing, and bridges the divide between the information technology community and diverse science and engineering disciplines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CyberBridges by providing four case studies. Groundwork has begun to extend the outreach of CyberBridges for international research and education collaborations.

The Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) NSF CI-TEAM demonstration project "CyberBridges" is a new model for creating a new generation of scientists and engineers who are capable of fully integrating Grid into the whole educational, professional, and creative process of their respective disciplines. CyberBridges augments graduate student education to include a foundation of understanding in high Grid Infrastructure and High Performance Computing, and bridges the divide between the information technology community and diverse science/engineering disciplines. CyberBridges is increasing the rate of discovery for science/engineering faculty by empowering them with cyberinfrastructure, foster inter-disciplinary research collaboration, improve minority graduate education, and institutionalize this change process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CyberBridges by providing four case studies with graduate students of Physics, Bioinformatics, Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering. We are now proposing extending the outreach of CyberBridges for international research collaborations with China and Brazil through Global CyberBridges.