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across the network. This control plane was demonstrated at SC05, and is the first of its kind that

is mathematically guaranteed to optimize bandwidth utilization at the network level. USN helped

the team lead by Caltech, SLAC and FNL win the bandwidth challenge competition by providing

40Gbps aggregate bandwidth via four OC192 connections. Over USN, 164 terabytes of data was

transported in a day by this team, while the individual link utilizations exceeded 95% several

times. This data volume is equivalent to transferring the entire library of congress collection 10-

20 times in a single day.

Over the past year, USN supported a number of network research projects, in addition to

providing connectivity. USN demonstrated that dedicated channels provisioned on IP networks

using MPLS tunnels can be seamlessly peered with SONET circuits by using VLAN; in particular

MPLS tunnels over ESnet and CHEETAH have been peered with USN SONET circuits. USN

team tested wide-area Infiniband transport over 10GigE connections of lengths 1400, 6600, and

8600 miles and showed that 4x (8Gbps peak) throughputs can be sustained with as little as 10%

reduction over these long distances. USN also demonstrated that the confocal microscopes at

PNNL can be interactively controlled from ORNL. USN also provided jitter and throughput

measurements on hybrid 1GigE connections of various lengths up to 34,000 miles, approximately

the connection length around the earth.

USN has attracted considerable attention from high-performance networking and application

community. Its architectural design has been adopted by the upcoming the next-generation US

LHCNet that will include dynamic circuit-oriented services, using the same Core Director

platforms as USN in a production network setting. Its design and control-plane technologies are

under consideration for potential adoption by NASA and DoD. The advanced bandwidth

scheduler of USN based on closed semi-ring algebraic structure led to several university efforts to

develop next generation of bandwidth and data transport schedulers, and will be adopted by

Internet2's HOPI project.

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