Registration Now Open for 2014 Technology Exchange Conference

2014-09-10 ~ ESnetComms

Registration is now open for the 2014 Technology Exchange, a leading technical event in the global research and education networking community. The annual meeting is co-organized by ESnet, the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network, and Internet2. The conference will be held Oct. 27-30 in Indianapolis.

The annual meeting brings together a wide range of technical experts to address the challenges facing the research and education networking community as it supports data-intensive research. The conference will be hosted this year by Indiana University.

According to the conference website, the technical challenges facing organizations today are not confined to the network alone and require the convergence of networking, computing, storage and other, emerging technologies. The Technology Exchange brings together the community’s technology visionaries, including the most inventive chief technologists, scientists, engineers, architects, operators and students in the world, to address these demands.

To register for the Technology Exchange, go to: http://meetings.internet2.edu/2014-technology-exchange/attendee-information/registration/

ESnet Student Assistant Henrique Rodrigues Wins Best Student Paper Award at Hot Interconnects

2014-09-052015-02-17 ~ ESnetComms

Henrique Rodrigues, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, San Diego, who is working with ESnet, won the best student paper award at the Hot Interconnects conference held Aug. 26-28 in Mountain View, Calif. Known formally as the 2014 IEEE 22nd Annual Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects, Hot Interconnects is the premier international forum for researchers and developers of state-of-the-art hardware and software architectures and implementations for interconnection networks of all scales.

Rodrigues’ paper, “Traffic Optimization in Multi-Layered WANs using SDN,” was co-authored by Inder Monga, Chin Guok and Eric Poulyou of ESnet, Abhinava Sadasivarao and Sharfuddin Syed of Infinera Corp. and Tajana Rosing of UC San Diego.

“Special thanks to ESnet that gave me the opportunity to work on such an important and interesting topic,” Rodrigues wrote to his ESnet colleagues. “Also to the reviewers of my endless drafts, making themselves available to provide feedback at all times. I hope to continue with the good collaboration moving forward!”

ESnet’s Greg Bell to Discuss Networking, Cybersercurity at Centers for Disease Control

2014-06-04 ~ ESnetComms

ESnet Director Greg Bell will give an invited talk on “Cyber Security and Data Mobility in a World of Ultrafast Networks and Data-Intensive Science” to senior IT managers and security staff at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta on Wednesday, June 4. The CDC has just completed the first phase of its “Research Grade Network” upgrade project, which was significantly influenced by ESnet designs and recommendations. Because the CDC has staff in 50+ countries, effective use of global networks is key to its success.

Bell was invited to give the talk by CDC Chief Technology Officer Jaspal Sagoo after they met when Bell gave a keynote talk on “Networking for Discovery” at Scaling Networks Securely and Cost Effectively, a one-day program targeted at government network providers and IT staff on Feb. 20, 2014.

Announcing the Keynotes for the Focused Technical Workshop on Climate!

2014-05-12 ~ ESnetComms

We are pleased to announce three influential keynote speakers for the upcoming Focused Technical Workshop titled “Improving Data Mobility and Management for International Climate Science”, which will be hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, CO from July 14-16, 2014.

The first keynote will be delivered by NOAA’s Dr. Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald, Chief Science Advisor and Director of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), who is known for his influential work in weather forecasting and high performance computing at NOAA.

Also from NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) and Princeton University, Dr. V. Balaji, Head of the Modeling Systems Group, will share the importance of bridging the worlds between science and software with workshop attendees.

And finally, Eli Dart, a highly-acclaimed network engineer from the Department of Energy’s ESnet who is credited with co-developing the Science DMZ model, will wrap up the workshop with the final keynote focused on how to create cohesive strategies for data mobility across computer systems, networks and science environments.

Inspired by each of the keynote speaker’s integral roles in climate science, computing and network architectures, the workshop intends to spark lively, interactive discussions between the research and education (R&E) and climate science communities to build long-term relationships and create useful tools and resources for improved climate data transport and management.

We look forward to seeing you in Boulder!

Don’t Forget… Still Time to Register!

Registration is only open to first 100 people!

Registration fee: $200

Visit the FTW website for more information:

http://events.internet2.edu/2014/ftw-climate/index.cfm

ESnet partners with eduPERT for TERENA Networking Conference Training

2014-02-19 ~ Jason Zurawski

ESnet, in collaboration with the GÉANT eduPERT team, will conduct a training session at the annual TERENA Networking Conference, May 18-19, in Dublin Ireland. This training will introduce performance monitoring and troubleshooting concepts using the perfSONAR measurement framework, along with network architecture designs including the Science DMZ. Registration for this event is available via the TNC conference web site: http://tnc2014.terena.org/core/event/10

NASA HECN Team Achieves Record Disk-to-Disk 91+ Gbps via ESnet

2014-01-142014-01-14 ~ ESnetComms

As a research and education network, one of ESnet’s accomplishments came to light at the end of 2013 during an SC13 demo in Denver, CO. Using ESnet’s 100 Gbps backbone network, NASA Goddard’s High End Computer Networking (HECN) Team achieved a record single host pair network data transfer rate of over 91 Gbps for a disk-to-disk file transfer. By close collaboration with ESnet, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), Brocade, Northwestern University’s International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR), and the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Advanced Computing (LAC), the HECN Team showcased the ability to support next generation data-intensive petascale science, focusing on achieving end-to-end 100 Gbps data flows (both disk-to-disk and memory-to-memory) across real-world cross-country 100 Gbps wide-area networks (WANs).

To achieve 91+ Gbps disk-to-disk network data transfer rate between a single pair of high performance RAID servers, this demo required a number of techniques working in concert to avoid any bottlenecks in the end-to-end transfer process. This required parallelization using multiple CPU cores, RAID controllers, 40G NICs, and network data streams; a buffered pipelined approach to each data stream, with sufficient buffering at each point in the pipeline to prevent data stalls, including application, disk I/O, network socket, NIC, and network switch buffering; a completely clean end-to-end 100G network path (provided by ESnet and MAX) to prevent TCP retransmissions; synchronization of CPU affinities for the application process and the disk and network NIC interrupts; and a suitable Linux kernel.

The success of the HECN Team SC13 demo proves that it is possible to effectively fully utilize real-world 100G networks to transfer and share large-scale datasets in support of petascale science, using Commercial Off-The-Shelf system, RAID, and network components, together with open source software.

View of the MyESnet Portal during the SC13 demo. Top visual shows a network topology graph with colors denoting the amount of traffic going over each part of the network. Bottom graph shows the total rate of network traffic vs. time across the backbone. — View of the MyESnet Portal during the SC13 demo. Top visual shows a network topology graph with colors denoting the scale of traffic going over each part of the network. Bottom graph shows the total rate of network traffic vs. time across the backbone.

ESnet, Caltech and NERSC Team Up to Send Data Screaming at 90 Gbps

2013-11-212013-11-21 ~ ESnetComms

ESnet, the Department of Energy’s high-bandwidth network, is working with Caltech and DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to move large data files at an average 90 gigabits per second (Gbps) to the SC13 conference in Denver.

ESnet’s Eric Pouyoul, who set up the data transfers, said that the transfer rate is both more impressive and more realistic as it is being transferred from disc to memory. “That’s reality – moving files from memory to memory is faster, but it’s not real life,” Pouyoul said.
To set up the demo, Pouyoul created 24 files, each containing 130 gigabytes of data and stored them at NERSC in Oakland, Calif. He configured them to transfer in loops over ESnet’s link to Denver and into the convention center – and over 15 hours achieved an average of 90 Gbps. The demo used the FDT (Fast Data Transfer) tool forr transferring the files, with support from the FDT team.ESnet is supporting four 100 Gbps links into SC13 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

Working in the Caltech booth in the SC13 Exhibition, network engineer Azher Mughal said the demonstration was created to help people understand how large datasets are becoming and how to efficiently transfer the data. Caltech manages the trans-Atlantic link that brings data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to the United States.Caltech-portal

“We want to showcase how you can efficiently manage large data sets, the challenges you’re likely to see, and how to optimize the transfer,” Mughal said. By sending the data across a single 100 Gbps line rather than multiple 10 Gbps links, there are fewer transfer problems and it requires fewer CPUs on the computer systems, making them more efficient in the process.

Caltech-portal

Attend a Hands-on Workshop for Science DMZs, SDN, and perfSONAR

2013-09-182013-09-18 ~ ESnetComms

Join ESnet, Indiana University and Internet2 in an upcoming hands-on workshop! Called the Operating Innovative Networks (OIN) Workshop, the meeting aims to help campus and lab network engineers deploy next-gen research networks that can support data-intensive science.

After the first successful workshop in Washington DC, the next workshop in the series will be held at the CIC Big Ten Conference Center in the Chicago area on October 3-4, 2013 and will be open to 30 attendees with no registration fee.

Only 30 seats are available and there is no registration fee!!

A few more details:

The workshop will consist of 1.5 days of presentation material along with “hands-on” exercises for building and deploying Science DMZs, Software Defined Networks, perfSONAR and Data Transfer Nodes. The content will be particularly useful for CC-NIE awardees that are being funded to upgrade their networks with these technologies. By the end of the event, attendees will have a better understanding of the requirements for supporting scientific use of the network, architectural strategies that can simplify these interactions, and knowledge of tools that can mitigate problems users may encounter.

For complete information on the program, location and registration details, visit: http://www.oinworkshop.com