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Research Scientists to Use Network ("Pacific Research Platform") Much Faster Than Internet
A series of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic cables will weave a cluster of West Coast university laboratories and supercomputer centers into a network called the Pacific Research Platform as part of a five-year $5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.
The network is meant to keep pace with the vast acceleration of data collection in fields such as physics, astronomy and genetics. It will not be directly connected to the Internet, but will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits among 10 University of California campuses and 10 other universities and research institutions in several states, tens or hundreds of times faster than is typical now.
The challenge in moving large amounts of scientific data is that the open Internet is designed for transferring small amounts of data, like web pages, said Thomas A. DeFanti, a specialist in scientific visualization at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, at the University of California, San Diego. While a conventional network connection might be rated at 10 gigabits per second, in practice scientists trying to transfer large amounts of data often find that the real rate is only a fraction of that capacity.
(Score: 1) by kc on Saturday August 01 2015, @11:03PM
The fine article did not actually mention which institutions are part of the network:
"...Pacific Research Platform, which currently includes Caltech, CENIC, ESnet, NASA Ames Research Center and the NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN), San Diego State University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, USC, and the University of Washington."
source; http://cenic.org/news/item/high-performance-big-science-pacific-research-platform-debuts-at-cenic-2015 [cenic.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @12:39PM
... nor does it mention that the project essentially comes down to linking [ucop.edu] the DMZ [es.net]'s [pdf] of those universities/research institutions by means of 3 existing networks: CENIC’s California Research & Education Network (CalREN [cenic.org]), the Department of Energy’s Energy Science Network (ESnet), and Pacific Wave, while separating the general usage [students & profs general applications] part from a research tier.
The CalREN network -- at least the High Performance Research part -- runs on Cisco cat6509's in the core, Brocade's at the distribution layer. That HPR part will function as the core of this setup [see slide 24 here [cenic.org] (ppt)], which essentially comes down to linking California's research centers at 100Gbps, overlaid with a mesh of cheap ($5k - $7k/node) data transfer nodes, each equipped with 2 40Gbps NICs [slide 22, and here [es.net]], transferring data disk-to-disk at 37Gbps (probable typo in press statement [cenic.org]).
If I interprete the slides correctly -- there's a vid which might go into more detail here [youtube.com] -- this is currently Layer 2 only, with the ambition to migrate to L3. An upscale to terabit per second speeds might be the greater ambition, if the subtitle "The bisection bandwidth of a cluster interconnect, but deployed on a 10 campus scale" on slide 3 is to be believed.