History is being written: from a simple diagram published in 1976 by Dr. Robert Metcalfe, with a data rate of 3 Mpbs, Ethernet surely has come a long way in the last 30 years. Coincidentally, the parent of ESnet, MFEnet, was also launched around the same time as a result of the new Fusion Energy supercomputer center at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) http://www.es.net/hypertext/esnet-history.html. It is remarkable to note that right now, as the 100GE standard got ratified, ESnet engineers are very much on the ball, busy putting 100GE enabled routers through the paces within our labs.

For ESnet and the Department of Energy – it is all about the science. To enable large-scale scientific discovery, very large scientific instruments are being built. You have read on the blog about DUSEL, and are familiar with LHC. These instruments – particle accelerators, synchrotron light sources, large supercomputers, and radio telescope farms are generating massive amounts of data and involve large collaborations of scientists to extract useful research results from it. The Office of Science is looking to ESnet to build and operate a network infrastructure that can scale up to meet the highly demanding performance needs of scientific applications. The Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI) to build the nationwide 100G prototype network and a research testbed is a great start. If you are interested in being part of this exciting initiative, do bid on the 100G Transport RFP.

As a community, we need to keep advancing the state of networking to meet the oncoming age of the digital data deluge (D³).

To wit, the recent IEEE 802.3ba press release: – http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/2010/ratification8023ba.html Note the quote from our own Steve Cotter:

Steve Cotter, Department Head, ESnet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
“As the science community looks at collaboratively solving hard research problems to positively impact the lives of billions of people, for example research on global climate change, alternative energy and energy efficiency, as well as projects including the Large Hadron Collider that probe the fundamental nature of our universe – leveraging petascale data and information exchange is essential. To accomplish this, high-bandwidth networking is necessary for distributed exascale computing. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is excited to leverage this standard to build a 100G nationwide prototype network as part of ESnet’s participation in the DOE Office of Science Advanced Networking Initiative.”