In October 2022, NIST researcher Cuong Nguyen contributed his testing expertise at the OpenFMB PlugFest 2.0, held at the Duke Energy Mount Holly facility in North Carolina and sponsored by the Utility Communications Architecture International User’s Group.
Basically, a "plugfest" is an event in which vendors and utilities meet to determine if their equipment will act and communicate with each other as needed, which reduces the risk of having to make costly modifications after equipment is purchased and installed. The OpenFMB PlugFest 2.0 sought to validate the interoperability of vendors' renewable energy products – or "distributed energy resources" – including interconnection with the power grid and cybersecurity capabilities. Moreover, this plugfest assessed whether these systems could perform in keeping with the OpenFMB Message Bus standard, ratified by the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB). This standard addresses such functions as controlling and communicating with distributed energies resources, sensing, and more.
Testing and certification of vendors' equipment provides buyers with assurance that it conforms with the OpenFMB Message Bus standard. This testing and certification will be done by the Battery Innovation Center, an Ohio-based laboratory.
As NIST's lead for testing and certification of smart grid and distributed energy systems, Nguyen served as the official third party technical observer to evaluate the standard's implementation towards testing accreditation, per the ISO/IEC 17025 standard, which addresses how to set up testing programs. Based on this evaluation, Nguyen provided expertise regarding what is needed for:
Testing to provide quality assurance that equipment will meet the OpenFMB Message Bus standard; and
Technical competency to test to the OpenFMB Message Bus standard.
The Battery Innovation Center is undergoing the certification process. Nguyen will also support the ANSI assessment of the Center’s technical capabilities.
In September 2022, NIST's Robert Lipman received the Bryan K. Martin Technical Excellence Award, which is presented annually by PDES, Inc., an industry, government, and university consortium committed to standardizing data exchange in manufacturing.
The award highlighted Lipman's contributions over a ten-year period. Notably, Lipman is an internationally recognized leader in recommended practices for implementing computer aided technologies (CAx) for the consortium of aerospace manufacturers, called LOTAR. Lipman helped significantly improve the quality of product and manufacturing information related to ISO 10303, called STEP – the "STandard for the Exchange of Product model data." Lipman also helped establish a forum for implementing computer-aided engineering, based on ISO 10303-209, which is the STEP standard for exchanging and archiving engineering analysis and simulation information. Additionally, Lipman greatly influenced educational outreach for bringing in the next generation of STEP developers, implementers, and consumers.
The award further pointed out that Lipman immersed himself in the STEP data model, making him one of the leading experts on its entity patterns and attribute population and enabling technical solutions when needed. And the award stated that Lipman kept technology transfer a priority, thus ensuring that PDES developments moved to industry.
This was Lipman's second Technical Excellence award; the first was presented by PDES in 2014.
The NIST team, supporting the Information Centric Networking Program, developed a high-speed networking router that allows Internet users to name data they seek and fetch it at speeds higher than 100 gigabit per second. The networking router, termed the "Named Data Networking-Data Plane Development Kit (NDN-DPDK)," was the first software implementation of the NDN protocol to reach such speed, and was developed to help address the need for better performance in future Internet architectures.
The NIST team participated and presented at a number of workshops on "FABRIC" ("FABRIC is an Adaptive Programmable Research Infrastructure for Computer Science and Science Applications"), which is funded by the National Science Foundation. At the most recent September 2022 workshop, the NIST team presented on the NDN-DPDK and its potential for experimentation. The subject was well received by workshop attendees. The NDN-DPDK will be deployed on the FABRIC testbed, which is used for cutting-edge experimentation and research at-scale in areas of networking.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, is used to test theoretical predictions in particle physics. It generates an estimated 900 petabytes at more than 170 sites in the US and across the world. The human genome sequencing initiative is believed to have amassed about an exabyte of data in institutions, labs, and industry. And similar amounts of data exist for the genome sequencing of plants, animals, viruses, and bacteria. These and other large data science programs face unprecedented challenges in managing data with limited computing, storage, and network resources.
To help, university and NIST researchers designed and implemented a new, field-tested system that efficiently distributes, caches, and accesses data for the Large Hadron Collider’s high energy physics (HEP) experiments and other major science programs. The system is called Named Data Network (NDN) for Data Intensive Science Experiments (N-DISE) and is described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking which took place in September 2022.
Initially, researchers developed a Named Data Networking scheme for naming the Large Hadron Collider data. They then built consumer and producer applications and implemented algorithms enabling fast forwarding of data packets and caching, which were integrated with the Named Data Networking router developed by NIST. The result was N-DISE, which researchers evaluated in a wide-area network testbed, spanning five sites across the U.S.
Researchers reported that tests showed an impressive performance for retrieval, forwarding, and caching of data, but believe that the system has more potential for performance gains. Researchers plan future enhancements, which will include integrating the N-DISE data distribution network with the Large Hadron Collider network and using it with a genomic use case.
NIST Global City Teams Challenge members contributed to the panel on Innovations in Digital Twins and IoT panel at the Smart Cities Expo USA in Miami FL, September 2022. NIST's GCTC lead, Michael Dunaway, provided an overview of NIST documents that can help integrate smart technologies and cyber-physical systems into communities. Raimundo Rodulfo, co-chair of the NIST GCTC Data SuperCluster and Chief Information Office for Coral Gables FL, addressed how the use of integrated digital technologies is aiding the city's innovation.
Coral Gables' "Smart City Hub" collects data from across the city via an IoT network, which is merged with analytics artificial intelligence. This results in a single and trusted source of publically available data, which can be used to:
Enhance awareness and visibility of city operations
Quickly update systems and improve operations in public and private sector
Improve public and private sector decision making
Enable collaborations that can improve services and operations
The Smart City Hub and analytics AI have also been merged with digital twin technologies. This capability allows users to build virtual representations of real-world physical systems; this enables their modeling so that developers can assess integration with other systems and technologies, study and predict performance; analyze maintenance improvements, and more. This spatial computing also can provide a virtual reality experience which can help navigate, inspect, monitor, and control area operations.
NIST's Bob Bohn presented "The Path to Cloud Federation via Standards" in IEEE Computer Society Webinar on Cloud Standards in September 2022. Bohn described the end-goal: a standards-based federation comprised of multiple cloud service providers. This federation would allow users to access all cloud services, with the providers still controlling what users could find within their respective services. This federation might also provide user-friendly interfaces.
Bohn also said there is a wide spectrum of options for such cloud federations. They could be small-scale, bare-bones federations; or they could range up to large-scale, industrial federations that are highly distributed and automated, and include such services as accounting, auditing, legal, and more.
Bohn then proposed a path forward, with NIST and IEEE collaborating on standards for a cloud federation, as they have done previously. One goal might be to form a public working group that develops a cloud federation vocabulary and conceptual model, based on a scope and purpose. The groups’ outputs would inform the IEEE's P2302 Working Group's development of a cloud federation standard. This would further enable an International Standard by ISO. A video of the presentation is available on the IEEE webinar site.
The magazine also reported on the keynote address by NIST's Rick Candell, who spoke on “IEEE P1451.5p Standard and the Future of Interference in Wireless Factories.” The magazine stated that Candell focused on the promises of wireless for smart manufacturing and that realizing these promises greatly depends on verification of wireless performance prior to deployment through a standardized process for the evaluation of industrial wireless systems performance. The magazine further said that Candell outlined the challenges to doing that and described the new standards work being done for IEEE P1451.5p.
