Berkeley Lab and Internet2 consortium launch world's fastest network
By
Bob Brewin
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Internet2 consortium plan to build a blistering fast network for the Energy Department that can transmit data at the rate of 100 gigabits per second to support scientific research.
The new network operates at such a high speed that it could transmit the entire printed holdings of the Library of Congress (approximately 12.5 terabytes of data) in roughly 23 seconds, explained Ryan Bass, spokesman for Internet2, a consortium of 300 universities, corporations and federal agencies formed in 1996 to develop and deploy revolutionary Internet technologies.
Rob Vietzke, Internet2 executive director of network services, said that as far as he knows the 100-gigabits-per-second network,slated to beginoperation by the end of the year,will be the fastest in the world.
The high-speed network will use 88 fiber strands on a national network operated by Level 3 Communications, with each of those strands capable of 100-gigabits-per-second speed, Vietzke said, with Ciena Corp. providing its 6500 optical platform for endpoint connections. The total throughput of the new network maxes out at 4.4 terabits per second, Vietzke said, adding that endpoint gear to handle terabit data flows are still in the experimental stage.
The new network will be built for the department's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) for its advanced networking initiative, funded by a $62 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant, said Steve Cotter, Energy's head for ESnet at the Berkeley Lab.
ESnet, founded in 1986, has seen demand grow by a factor of 10 roughly every four years, Cotter said.The national laboratory system needs a higher speed network to support unclassified scientific research projects run on supercomputers that spew out terabytes of data.
These projects include the traditional physics research done by the national laboratories as well as climate and genomic research, Cotter said. There has been "an explosion in the data" generated by relatively cheap genome sequencing machines, with one machine outputting a terabyte of data a day. Some genome sequencing organizations have 50 such machines, Cotter said.
The 100 gigabits-per-second network also will serve as the United States' link to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research to explore the fundamentals of physics, including the relationship between space and time.That machine produces terabytes of data that needs to be transmitted to the national labs for further research, Cotter said.
ESnet will hook up three labs this year to the 100-gigabits-per-second network, Cotter said: the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, as well as the Manhattan Landing International Exchange Point in New York, which serves as the network's trans-Atlantic gateway.
Cotter said one of the first project of the network is to link to the Magellan scientific cloud computing project run by the Argonne lab, which is designed to provide distributed computing resources and storage.
The new high-speed network, Cotter said, much like the original Internet, will have societal impacts through its support of basic research where bandwidth demands keep growing.