Page1    Page174                                                                        Page176  Page177

Appendix 34. UltraScience Net: Network Research

Testbed for DOE Large-Scale Science Applications

Nagi Rao (raons@ornl.gov)

Bill Wing (wrw@ornl.gov)

UltraScience Net

Last updated January, 2007

The next generation of 100-1000 Teraflop supercomputers as well as national- and global-scale

grid systems needed for U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) large-scale science computations hold

an enormous promise for large-scale computational science projects from fields as diverse as

earth science, high energy and nuclear physics, astrophysics, fusion energy science, molecular

dynamics, nanoscale materials science, and genomics. These computations are expected to

generate hundreds of petabytes of data, which must be transferred, visualized and steered by

geographically distributed teams of scientists. In the experimental sciences area, DOE operates

several extremely valuable experimental facilities, for example, the Spallation Neutron Source.

The ability to remotely conduct experiments, and transfer large measurement data sets, can

significantly enhance the productivity of scientists and facilities. Indeed, the above networking

capabilities add a whole new dimension to the access of these computers and user facilities, by

eliminating the "single location, single time zone" bottlenecks. But, the existing testbeds and

networks for providing such channels typically have a very small footprint or bandwidth, offer

only a single lambda or sub-lambda, and are not field-hardened and optimized for wide-area

deployments.

Figure 98: USN's dual 10bps links span Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle and Sunnyvale. It

connects ORNL, PNNL, FNL, SLAC, ESnet and Caltech.

UltraScienceNet (USN), shown in Figure 98, is an experimental network research testbed

dedicated to the development of networking capabilities needed for the above DOE large-scale

science applications. USN backbone consists of dual SONET OC192 10Gbps links that span

Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle and Sunnyvale as shown in Figure 99. It currently provides connectivity

to Fermi National Laboratory (FNAL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Pacific

Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), ESnet and

175