PROCESSORS

Responding to the increasingly data-intensive demands of the scientific community, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is implementing a new architecture of connected Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). Esnet, which is managed by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a high-speed network serving thousands of DOE scientists and collaborators worldwide. A pioneer in providing high-bandwidth, reliable connections, ESnet enables researchers at national laboratories, universities and other institutions to communicate with each other using the collaborative capabilities needed to address some of the world's most important scientific challenges. ESnet connects 40 sites nationally and provides high-speed connectivity for DOE collaborations with the U.S. research and education community and collaborations with the international science communities in Europe and Asia. ESnet’s current architecture consists of a national core network connecting six hubs. The individual sites are connected to the hubs in a single circuit spoke-like fashion. However, for reasons of both reliability and bandwidth, this architecture is insufficient to meet future demands. Over the past two years, two workshops sponsored by DOE’s Office of Science examined a set of major DOE science disciplines. They determined that the process of science related to computing and communication must change over the next decade in order to make significant progress. Such changes include: using massive amounts of distributed data, coupling multiple simulation components that run at different locations, and accessing, using, and managing computing resources that scattered over much of the globe. “The network capabilities that address these requirements include high bandwidth connectivity, guaranteed bandwidth services and highly reliable network connectivity,” said Bill Johnston, project manager for ESnet. “We just couldn’t meet these needs with our previous architecture. “One benefit of the ring structure of the MANs is that it will provide the national labs with redundant access to the network, thus providing substantially increased reliability,” Johnston said. “Additionally, multiple optical channels will allow for ESnet to provide new services identified in the science requirements, in particular guaranteed high bandwidth channels.” The new MANs, the first of which will be built in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be based on multiple 10 gigabit/second (Gb/s) optical channels (“lambdas”) that provide high-speed access to the ESnet core network. In the long term, the ring structured MANs will be connected by more than one national core network, with each national core connecting to the MANs at different physical locations for increased wide-area reliability, Johnston said. The San Francisco Bay Area ESnet MAN will be a 10 Gb/s ring and will connect DOE’s Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Joint Genome Institute (JGI), National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the ESnet core network hub in Sunnyvale, Calif., which is run by Qwest Communications International, Inc., and the Level 3 Communications, Inc.’s Sunnyvale site that includes a National Lambda Rail hub with access to DOE’s UltraScience Net. The San Francisco Bay Area MAN has just received approval and funding from DOE. Engineering and construction should take about six months. This will be followed by six months of testing and integration into the production of ESnet. Some sites will require less construction and will be connected earlier within this time frame. ESnet is funded by the DOE Office of Science’s Mathematics, Information, and Computer Science (MICS) program. To learn more about MICS, go to http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/mics/. ESnet provides network and collaboration services in support of the agency's research missions. For more information about ESnet, go to http://www.es.net/. The DOE workshop reports are available at http://www.es.net/#research. Berkeley Lab is managed by the University of California for DOE and conducts unclassified research. For more information, go to http://www.lbl.gov.