November 2011

Pacific Wave @ SC11

CENIC and PNWGP hosted a Pacific Wave booth #6106 located on Level6 of the Seattle Convention Center during the recent Supercomputing Conference November 13-18, 2011.

Several Pacific Wave participants used the Pacific Wave infrastructure for demonstrations within their Supercomputing booths. There were some issues with the VLANs allocated to participants due to some incompatibilities in the hardware donated to SCinet for the network. Traffic over the dedicated 10-gigabit link was lightly used during Supercomputing.

Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) used multiple 10 gigs into their booth and a 100 gig from University of Victoria, Canada. During their tests they used a set of 2x40GE and 2x40GE highly tuned servers to receive network traffic at rate of approximately 98Gbps. This demonstration did not involve Pacific Wave infrastructure.

Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) and Caltech participated in the DYNES Collaborative demonstration to show how the instrument can be quickly deployed among different participants and used to do massive data transfers. This experiment did utilize Pacific Wave capacity. For more on both demonstrations, see: http://supercomputing.caltech.edu/.

The data reservoir project was featured at the University of Tokyo booth. The university was part of a team that received the ACM Gordon Bell prize for their “K computer” research results.

The NICT Booth demonstrated a 3-D perfSONAR Weather Map showing the Transpac, JGN-X and SX-Transport links across the Pacific into Pacific Wave. A larger picture is shown in the perfSONAR section below. Utilizing bandwidth over Pacific wave, NICT displayed space weather forecast computing, a demonstration with dynamic network path creation protocols and sensor networking.

Also in the NICT booth, the NTT GEMNET researchers prepared and ran an experiment using multiple paths and links to understand the optimum packet size for super high definition transmissions. Preliminary results show that the optimum packet size was 1000KB, which is non-standard size. Jan Eveleth has asked for a copy of the report when they complete it. They are planning on using this technology to broadcast the Summer Olympics in London next summer.

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