ORNL, Juniper Networks and Myricom Demonstrate 100 Gigabit Ethernet at SC11

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Myricom, and Juniper Networks are demonstrating “wide-area” 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) between the ORNL and Juniper Networks booths at SC11. With the increasing size of scientific data sets and the accelerating need to share these data sets between different organizations across the U.S. and around the world, this demonstration highlights data movement between distinct organizational domains that are bridged into a single Ethernet fabric using a high-performance, hardware-optimized communication software stack.

To create the unified Ethernet broadcast domain for the SC11 demonstration, each booth has a Juniper Networks MX 3D Universal Edge Router connected by a 100 GbE link, separate from SCinet’s backbone. These routers provide Virtual Private LAN Services to allow a machine in one domain to access a machine in another domain. This demonstration highlights data movement between distinct organizational domains that are bridged into a single Ethernet fabric using a high-performance, hardware-optimized communication software stack.

Connected to the routers in each booth is a single host with four Myricom network interface cards, each with dual 10-GbE ports. Each host is connected to the Juniper Networks router via eight 10-GbE links for a combined capacity of 80 gigabits per second (Gbps). Using a hardware-accelerated implementation of the Common Communication Interface (CCI), a single thread using CCI will be able to push 80 Gbps of data to the other host.

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility provides world-class computational resources to teams of researchers from around the world,” said Galen Shipman, leader of ORNL’s Technology Integration Group. “Supporting access to and collaboration among these researchers requires the use of leading-edge technologies for data movement and high-performance remote access. Our work with Juniper and Myricom demonstrates advances in wide-area networking, end-system network architecture, and an optimized software stack for data movement.”

Catch the demonstration and get more information at the ORNL Booth #1831 and the Juniper Networks Booth #2145 at SC11.