Live Demonstrations of 100-Gbps File Transfers Across LANs and WANs

Overview

Overcoming throughput bottlenecks in large file transfers over wide area networks (WANs) is critical to sharing data with NASA's Earth Science programs. The High-End Computer Networking (HECN) Team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is investigating new high-performance servers, disk configurations, and 40- and 100-gigabit per second (Gbps) network interfaces to resolve these bottlenecks.

In cooperation with several partners, NASA will conduct live, real-time demonstrations of 100-Gbps file transfer experiments between the NASA exhibit (booth #831) at SC12 and NASA Goddard in Greenbelt, MD, across 100-Gbps local and wide area networks.

Project Details

New technologies featured in these demonstrations include:

• Intel Sandy Bridge EP processors and Supermicro X9DR3-F PCI Express Gen3-based motherboards with quad channels to memory
• OCZ Vertex3 solid-state disks and LSI MegaRaid 9271 RAIDs
• Hot Lava three-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) network interface cards
• Prototype 100GE network interface cards developed by Acadia Optronics through a Department of Energy grant
• 100GE-capable switches and optical gear from Ciena, Brocade, Infinera, ADVA, Fujitsu, Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, and possibly others

The High-Performance Networking for Petascale Science Consortium was formed to investigate, evaluate, develop and demonstrate new techniques and methods to create services for transporting extremely large-scale data streams in support of petascale science at 100 Gbps. The consortium includes NASA Goddard, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads, the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, the Naval Research Laboratory, the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility, and the Metropolitan Research and Education Network. Consortium support comes from the ESnet Advanced Network Initiative, Ciena, and Sidera Networks. Other key demonstration partners are SCinet, National LambdaRail, Internet2, Brocade, Fujitsu, cPacket, Arista, and Force10.

Results and Impact

Science research has transitioned from relying solely on two classic building blocks—theory and experimentation—to also using modeling and simulation. Increasingly, these techniques require massive amounts of data that must be gathered, analyzed, stored, and transported among multiple sites worldwide.

Role of High-End Computing Resources

Using NASA Goddard's Science and Engineering Network (funded by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation) and several R&D WANs managed by our partners, the HECN Team achieved a throughput rate of approximately 60 Gbps when copying files over WANs at SC11. With new PCI Express Gen3 servers and processors, we expect to demonstrate nearly 100-Gbps cross-country WAN file transfers at SC12.