[CAnet - news] ESnet's New Architecture for Next Generation Science

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[Thanks to Jon Bshnor for this pointer--BSA]

Building ESnet's New Architecture to
Support Next-Generation DOE Science

BERKELEY, Calif.   The U. S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network
(ESnet), which supports the large-scale science and large-scale
collaborations of DOE's Office of Science, has taken the first steps to
implement a new network architecture that will increase the reliability and
dramatically boost the bandwidth available to the DOE research community.
The new architecture is designed to meet the increasing demand for network
bandwidth and advanced network services as next-generation scientific
instruments and supercomputers come on line. The new architecture is
composed of two elements: First, metropolitan area fiber optic rings will
redundantly connect national labs to ESnet at very high bandwidth. Second, a
new national ESnet backbone network   the Science Data Network   will
substantially increase the cross-country bandwidth and route diversity
available to DOE researchers.
The new architecture also forms the basis for advanced network services,
such as guaranteed bandwidth virtual circuits. Such services are essential
to support continuous science data analysis (e.g., from the CERN particle
accelerator's CMS and ATLAS high energy physics experiments in Switzerland)
by thousands of U. S. scientists, and to support real-time interaction with
on-line facilities, such as DOE's Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory and magnetic fusion experiments at General Atomics,
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and MIT.
The first steps in implementing the new ESnet architecture have been
completed. A contract has been signed with National Lambda Rail for the
first two segments of the new Science Data Network backbone (San Diego to
Silicon Valley to Seattle) that will provide 10 Gigabits/s bandwidth to
General Atomics, UC San Diego, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the
University of Washington, and several international trans-Pacific links.
These links, which will provide 64 times more bandwidth than currently
available, will be in place by mid-summer.
A second contract has just been signed with Qwest Communications to build
the first of the metropolitan area network rings (MANs) that will
dramatically increase bandwidth to the labs. The first MAN ring will be in
the San Francisco Bay Area and will provide dual connectivity at 20 to 30
Gb/s (10 to 50 times the current site bandwidths, depending on the site
using the ring) to six DOE sites - the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Joint Genome Institute
(JGI), the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories/California -
at substantially reduced cost. The MAN will also allow high-speed access to
California's higher education network (CENIC), NASA's Ames Research Center
and DOE's R&D network, Ultra Science Net. These sites will be connected to
the MAN in stages, starting in April with SLAC and completing in September
this year, with JGI. The Bay Area MAN will connect to both the existing
ESnet production backbone and the first segments of the new Science Data
Network backbone.
These newly signed contracts are the first steps in a complete
transformation of ESnet in order to accommodate the needs of the next
generation of DOE science.
ESnet is operated for DOE by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. To learn
more, go to < http://www.es.net>. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of
Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts
unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of
California. Learn more at <http://www.lbl.gov>.
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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.



Bill St. Arnaud
Senior Director Network Projects
CANARIE
[email protected]
+1 613 944-5603

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