Bridging High-Performance Connections across Packet-Switched and Circuit-Switched Networks
When hundreds of terabytes of data need to be moved from a supercomputer to a remote storage or visualization site, or data from an experiment facility needs to be interactively generated and transported to a remote user, the Internet, shared by everyone, is just not adequate. High-performance dedicated connections that connect scientists host sites to these facilities offer promising solutions: one can employ specialized protocols that optimize the throughput or achieve smooth interactive control for the duration of the connection.
There are two fundamentally different ways of provisioning these dedicated connections. The first uses circuit-switched connections as in DOE UltraScience Net (USN) and provides very cost-effective connections, but requires an infrastructure of switches. The second provides dedicated connections by building special point-to-point tunnels using routers on a packet-switched network such as DOE’s ESnet. ESnet uses the already existing routers, but is very expensive to build from scratch. These approaches use different addresses, controls and protocols; the conventional wisdom has always been that they couldn’t “talk” to each other.
By combining USN and ESnet resources, DOE demonstrated conclusively that dedicated connections on both infrastructures offer comparable performance, and can be transparently carried across these two disparate infrastructures with no performance degradation. These results contributed to the ESnet’s strategy for large-science networking: provide dedicated connections on existing packet-switched, routed infrastructure, and build the newer Science Data Network using cheaper switched architecture.
For more information, please contact:
William Wing
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