T-Systems and Alcatel-Lucent Spin Up 100Gbit Ethernet

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Alcatel-Lucent and T-Systems [the corporate consumer arm of Deutsche Telekom] announced today that they have successfully deployed a 100Gbit link between data centers between the technical universities of Dresden and Bergakademie Freiberg.  The link, spanning 60km, utilizes both optical and IP technologies in order to transmit signals over a single wavelength.

As far as network performance is concerned, there is no doubt that we are on
our way to the gigabit society, which requires gigabit networks,” says Hagen
Rickmann, who is responsible for Innovations and Portfolio Management at
Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems unit. “We must ensure that we can adapt our
networks to the constantly increasing demand for bandwidth anytime and in an
economical way. Testing the new 100 Gigabit technology between Dresden and
Freiberg under real conditions is an important milestone on this way.”

The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing [ZIH] of Technical University Dresden and the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg will use the link to test different application scenarios.  One such scenario includes mounting Lustre file systems over the high bandwidth WAN.

With the increasing research focus on engineering in Freiberg, High Performance
Computing is a key technology for us. In addition to our own systems we are
strengthening our collaboration with ZIH. This testbed allows us to develop and
evaluate future concepts of High Performance Computing usage in Saxony”, says
Dr. Andreas Kluge, director of the computer center at TU Bergakademie Freiberg.

This is very cool stuff.  10Gbit Ethernet has become somewhat ubiquitous within reasonably large HPC centers.  100Gbit single links [as opposed to aggregated 10GbE’s] takes things to a new level.  For more info, read their full release here.