We’ve got Yoo

Professor Ben Yoo

ESnet is pleased to announce that UC Davis Professor S.J. Ben Yoo has been granted a joint faculty appointment with Berkeley Lab, formalizing a long-term relationship.  Yoo will be collaborating on research projects with ESnet to develop Terabit optical networks of the future to meet the upcoming data challenges triggered by Exascale thinking within the DOE.  It is an interesting research challenge, including architecture studies, software developments and networking experiments on ESnet’s ANI testbed. Yoo will also be collaborating with LBNL researchers at NERSC for applications of optical networking within high-end data centers.

“Ben is the type of highly credentialed network research scientist that we hope will take full advantage of the testbed infrastructure we are making available to the community.” said Steve Cotter, head of ESnet.

In a talk this week at Joint Techs http://bit.ly/cAtNt4, Yoo discussed the potential of next generation all-optical Label Switching (OLS) networking, a technology he invented. OLS can seamlessly integrate packet, flow, and circuit traffic. OLS has the potential to fit well within the  industry standard MPLS and GMPLS architectures, and recent experimental results show very good characteristics like extremely low latency (<100 ns) and scalability beyond 40 petabit/sec capacity. It has experimentally demonstrated a per-channel line rate of 100 Gb/s ~ 1.2 Tb/s. A centralized management station can leverage OLS to rapidly assess data flows based on real time collections of labels that contain statistical information about the data traffic.

Yoo has done extensive research with the ATD-Monet testbed in the Washington DC area, telecommunications standardization services at Bellcore, and testbed work at the Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratory. You can get a better sense of his work and research here.

We look forward to working with him on our ANI testbed as well. Yoo’s intention is to push the testbed to its limits. Should be a wild ride.

100Gbps Prototype Network RFP is out!

All those cheers and whoops from the top of the Berkeley Hill would be us. ESnet just nailed another ANI milestone. We got out our RFP to vendors for the next stage in the nationwide 100Gbps prototype network.

The network will deliver data at scorching speeds and link three of the Department of Energy’s major supercomputing centers— NERSC at Berkeley Lab, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee— and MANLAN, the international exchange point in New York.

Your ARRA stimulus money is busy, this time building the infrastructure to help scientists communicate and deal with all that data proliferation from places like the Large Hadron Collider. We handle petabytes of data a month with our usual aplomb; but terabit networking is not far in our future. Good to get prepared.

Listening to the drumbeats of 100G

Since we received the news of our ARRA funds for our Advanced Network Initiative (ANI), we have been working steadily towards the ambitious goal of deploying 100G technology to stimulate networking advancement in high-speed interfaces. In the course of pushing the ANI agenda over the last year we have met with many carriers and vendors. Although I cannot share my personal conversations with these vendors–the thought of flocks of lawyers descending upon me ensures reticence–I have avidly been tracking their public announcements.

Just today Cisco announced the acquisition of Core Optics, a coherent optics board vendor. I had the good fortune to see their 40G system working at OFC this year and I am sure they are working hard on getting their 100G system up and running. Google typically has been quiet about the innovations in their network to keep up with data center innovations. But they have been uncharacteristically beating the 100G drum in public – which meshes very well with our needs. If you look at ESnet, the traffic transiting our network is growing at an alarming rate of 80% year over year.



At the Packet-Optical Transport Evolution conference (http://www.lightreading.com/live/event_information.asp?event_id=29209) Bikash Koley, Senior Network Architect, Google points at machine to machine traffic (like video sensors) as the motivators for needing such bandwidth and cites hybrid networking or packet-optical integration as solving the problems of the day.

If I can quote their article in Lightreading (http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=192230&amp;):

“Regardless of how the network looks, Google is dead set on one thing: it wants label-switched routing and DWDM capabilities to be combined into one box. It doesn’t matter if that’s a label-switched router (LSR) with DWDM added, or a DWDM box with Layer 3 knowledge added,”Koley said. (He also stressed that the LSR doesn’t have to be a full-blown router.)

Now that is one statement we are in agreement with Bikash Koley and Google. Our own experience developing OSCARS (On-demand Secure Circuits and Advanced Reservation System – www.es.net/oscars) and the hybrid networking architecture to deal with large science flows since 2004 has led us down the path of on-demand traffic-engineered paths. With MPLS being the only choice at that time (discussing the merits of new IEEE mac-in-mac protocols will require a separate blog), we created the OSCARS open-source software to dynamically configure LSPs through our hybrid packet-optical network. That worked very well for us, though it was clear that we did not really need the service/edge capabilities built into the router. So if there is a way to make the core simpler, cheaper and more energy-efficient – sign me up for that and we will run OSCARS over it to steer those circuits to where our customers want it.

We at ESnet continue to march ahead towards the 100G-prototype network. I look forward to your comments on 40G, 100G, the new Ethernet standards and the way to higher rates (400GE, 1TBE.)

Inder Monga, Network Architect

Email me at: Imonga@es.net