Network Infrastructure Upgraded to 10 Gbps

Recognizing the demand for reliable high-speed networks to support the HPC community and its projected data flow requirement increases, the Scientific and Engineering Network (SEN) and the NCCS each upgraded their network infrastructures to 10 gigabit per second (Gbps). These upgrades capitalize on the wide-area NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN) upgrade, which increased the bandwidth in its backbone link between GSFC and ARC’s Project Columbia from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps using the National LambdaRail (NLR).

In March 2006, the SEN’s perimeter router began operationally supporting a 10-Gbps connection from the NREN’s GSFC-local 10-Gigabit Ethernet (GE) switch/router. In the weeks prior, CISTO’s Bill Fink assisted the NREN in stress testing the new 10-Gbps lambda-based connection obtained from the NLR by generating 9.2-Gbps of User Datagram Protocol (UDP)-based Internet Protocol (IP) packets between two pairs of SEN-based computers, but where the data traffic between those pairs was looped out to Sunnyvale, CA, and back. In several 6-hour duration tests of the new connection, the NLR never lost a packet, and the NREN Project accepted the link for operational use.

In April 2006, the NCCS began pre-operational end-to-end readiness tests of its 10-Gbps network infrastructure, which includes multiple 10-GE ports on a new switch/router and 10-GE network interface cards (NICs) for several NCCS supercomputer platforms. End-to-end single-stream TCP-based IP packet flow testing between an NCCS SGI Origin 3800 and a not-fully-tuned high-performance workstation at ARC across the 10-Gbps NREN demonstrated up to 1.5-Gbps throughput performance, and testing with two simultaneous TCP-based streams demonstrated up to 3.0-Gbps throughput performance.

Operational cut-over of several more NCCS supercomputer platforms to the 10-GE network infrastructure is planned before the end of June.

In recent presentations made to the Sciences and Exploration Directorate’s Data Archive and Distribution for High-Performance Computing Working Group, Christa Peters-Lidard, Head of the Hydrological Sciences Branch, concluded with the prediction, “NASA science will be bandwidth limited – not CPU limited.” Mike Seablom, Head of SIVO, added, “Now and beyond, data and networking are the central elements to enable faster leaps in performance.” The 10-Gbps upgrades of the NREN, SEN, and NCCS network infrastructures will help fulfill those predictions.

http://cisto.gsfc.nasa.gov/SENuser.html
http://www.nccs.nasa.gov