Indiana University staff and faculty will build the world’s first single-channel 400-gigabit-per-second-capable network for research and education at SC18. The connection will be capable of transmitting 50 gigabytes of data every second—or, enough to stream 16,000 ultra-high-definition movie. The demonstration, “Wide area workflows at 400 Gbps,” is IU’s submission to the conference’s annual Network Research Exhibition, which spotlights innovation in emerging network hardware, protocols, and advanced network-intensive scientific applications.
IU’s demonstration will leverage the advanced capabilities of SCinet, the dedicated high-capacity network for SC18. For the duration of the conference, SCinet is the fastest and most powerful network in the world.
We could see the increasing rate of data production from digital instruments and simulations was creating datasets of such size that they were cumbersome to move,” said Stephen Simms, manager of IU’s High Performance File Systems team and Data Capacitor grant co-principal investigator. “Simple data management tasks, like replication and version control, were becoming tricky operations. In cases like these we thought it might be advantageous to compute in place.”
IU deployed Data Capacitor WAN, the first production Lustre WAN file system in 2009, which allowed researchers to compute against their data across distance, and made it available to the NSF TeraGrid project.
Indiana University is working with the following collaborators who will make this ground-breaking demonstration happen: Ciena, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, DataDirect Networks, Whamcloud, ESnet, Juniper, Mellanox, NVIDIA, PIER Group, SCinet, Starlight, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Visit Indiana University at SC18 booth# 2400.
