ENGINEERING

17 Supercomputers and 8,000 Scientists Benefit By Using Nation’s Fastest Research & Education Network

Internet2, operator of the nation’s fastest research and education network, and XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, announced today that XSEDE has migrated and upgraded its network backbone infrastructure to the Internet2 Network. The upgrade allows XSEDE to use Internet2’s new 100G (Gigabit Ethernet)-enabled and 8.8-terabit-per-second optical network, platform, services and technologies.

XSEDE is a National Science Foundation-supported project that brings together 17 supercomputers, visualization and data analysis engines, and data storage resources along with data collections, computational tools, and services to support science and engineering research and education across the United States. More than 8,000 scientists regularly use XSEDE to complete thousands of research projects supporting more than 2,000 publications annually.

“Advanced networking is critical to XSEDE in order to support the researchers and educators who are making innovative use of our computing, data, and visualization resources that are distributed across the country,” said XSEDE project director John Towns. “Our partnership with Internet2 enables us to continue to provide advanced, powerful, robust services for discovery and innovation.”

Internet2 and the XSEDEnet networking group will work together to configure a private network between the XSEDE service provider sites across the shared backbone. A majority of sites will connect to the nearest Internet2 Advanced Layer 2 Service node at 10G and share bandwidth across a 100G backbone with other participants. Initially, Indiana University and Purdue University will have 100G connections.

"This is an extremely important milestone that advances the strategic alignment between the high performance computing and Internet2 communities," said Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie. "Having the massive computational capabilities of XSEDE coupled directly to the most advanced network capabilities with the broadest reach among the U.S. and global research communities is of critical importance to the success of XSEDE."

"XSEDE will now be able to provide the fastest research and education network in the nation to more than 8,000 scientists who regularly use some of the fastest supercomputers in the world," said Internet2 President and CEO H. David Lambert. "Our new network allows researchers to conduct the latest scientific research in ways that they have not been able to do previously. I am excited to hear about future research impacting society from scientists using XSEDE resources and our new network."

With the migration to Internet2, new sites can be easily added to the XSEDE backbone through connections to Internet2 Advanced Layer 2 Service nodes. In addition, the upgrade also eliminates the potential bottleneck between Denver and Chicago associated with the prior XSEDE backbone architecture. The new network infrastructure is expected to enable the development of new applications, such as an XSEDE-wide File System (XWFS), which will allow the increasingly very large files required by researchers to be moved rapidly between XSEDE sites.