Berkeley Lab has landed a big chunk of change from the Department of Energy. $62million will flow their way in order to develop a prototype 100Gbps Ethernet network designed to connect the various DoE supercomputing centers. The new network will bump current connectivity by 10X, considering the current 10Gbps links. The current network, ESnet, serves an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 DoE users and more than 18,000 non-DoE researchers from edu’s, government agencies and private industry.
This network will serve as a pilot for a future network-wide deployment of 100 Gbps Ethernet in research and commercial networks and represents a major step toward DOE’s vision of a 1-terabit—1,000 times faster than 1 gigabit—network interconnecting DOE Office of Science supercomputer centers” said Michael Strayer, head of DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research in a statement.
The funding comes at the hands of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. According to the article, the project will create jobs for several network and software engineers as well as the purchase of new networking gear. Just as an aside, I openly offer my home as a potential 100Gbps beta site. Please?
For more info, read the full article here.
[…] and transferring data at 100 gigabits per second, or 10 times faster than the existing network, insideHPC reports. Most of the funds, awarded to the Berkeley Lab’s ESnet team under the stimulus package, will […]