With its research partners, the StarLight Consortium is engaged in creating innovative digital communications and networks for advanced services and applications that cannot be supported by traditional communications infrastructure. Currently, applications and services must be designed in the context of current information technology infrastructure restrictions. Emerging and anticipated services and applications require communication capabilities that are substantially more powerful, functional, scalable, flexible, dynamic, programmable, and customizable than those currently deployed. Such requirements motivate the designing and creation of new communication methods, techniques, and technologies to empower services and applications with previously impossible capabilities.

For example, current architectural trends create designs that provide interoperation and integrate multiple components into distinct, seamless, distributed digital fabrics. This approach is made possible by new techniques for virtualizing network resources so that they can be highly programmable, e.g., using Software Defined Networking (SDN, an architecture that separates the control plane from the data plane) and the P4 programming language to enable resources to be transparent, discovered, accessible, and assembled to meet precise requirements.

A related approach is designing and implementing large-scale distributed Research Platforms, such as the Global Research Platform and the National Research Platform, which enable enhanced services for global data-intensive science research.