Cloud Computing: 100 Gbps Services Showcased at LambdaGrid
October 29, 2012
Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Editorial Staff.
Today for the 12th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop, sponsored by the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), a consortium of researchers demonstrated a 100 Gbps optical network testbed established to develop advanced services and technologies for next generation data-intensive “petascale science.” The testbed is a contiguous facility from the Washington DC area to the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility in Chicago.
In contrast to more general implementations of 100 Gbps services, which aggregate many millions of small traffic flows, this facility supports extremely large-capacity data flows, including a 98 Gbps data transfer between a single pair of high performance servers with zero packet drops from the East Coast to Chicago and back (approximately 2,000 miles)The research consortium was established to investigate new networking techniques, technologies, and services for petascale science, with a focus on 100 Gbps end-to-end data flows, including disk-to-disk and memory-to-memory. These innovations were showcased during the demonstrations; for example, transporting extremely large-volume individual data flows over long distances with high performance and low latency. Members of the consortium include the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University (iCAIR), and the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Chicago (LAC)…
To establish the petascale science optical-network testbed, the consortium formed a partnership with Sidera Networks, Ciena, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) — a seven state regional network, the StarLight consortium, and the Open Cloud Consortium –which manages the national Open Science Data Cloud testbed computational-science facility. Sidera Networks is providing a 100 Gbps low-latency path from the MAX exchange facility in Washington DC to the StarLight exchange in Chicago. Ciena is supporting this initiative with their high-performance 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and 5410 Reconfigurable Switching System. MREN and StarLight are providing support with StarWave, a multi-100-Gbps exchange facility…
Read more from the source @ http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-10-29/100_gbps_services_showcased_at_lambdagrid.html