SCinet 2011: Delivering 450 Gigabits per second of Capacity to Seattle
During the seven days of the SC11 conference, Seattle will host of one of the most powerful and advanced networks in the world – SCinet. Provisioned each year for the short duration of the conference, SCinet brings to life a highly sophisticated, very high capacity networking infrastructure that supports the revolutionary applications and network experiments that are the trademark of the SC Conference. SCinet serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources of their home institutions and elsewhere by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications including supercomputing and cloud computing.
Designed and built entirely by volunteers from universities, government and industry, SCinet connects multiple wide area circuits to the exhibit floor, linking the Washington State Convention Center to research and commercial networks around the world such as the Department of Energy's ESnet, Internet2, National LambdaRail, and others.
This year, SCinet will boast capacity reaching more than 450 gigabits per second using multiple brand new 100G connections to the major national research networks. This bandwidth provides never before seen network capability to support the extreme demonstrations of the HPC community. Over 8 projects are anticipated to use the 100G capabilities exclusively because of the high capacity demands of their demo applications.
SCinet will also feature the SCinet Research Sandbox (SRS) which is designed to allow researchers to experimentally test and demonstrate their ideas on innovative network architectures, applications and protocols in the unique live environment of the SCinet network. This year, the SRS will provide researchers with access to over 100 Gigabits per second of capacity and the flexibility of a software-programmable testbed network on the SCinet infrastructure.
To do so, the SC11 SRS will feature for the first time a 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps), multi-vendor OpenFlow network testbed connected from the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle to several national research networks to provide wide area OpenFlow capabilities. OpenFlow allows the implementation of software-defined network policy and is poised to revolutionize the networking environment and in turn its ability to support HPC applications.
Volunteers from academia, government and industry work together to design and deliver the SCinet infrastructure. Industry vendors and carriers donate much of the equipment and services needed to build the local and wide area networks. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC Conference and culminates with a high-intensity installation just seven days before the conference begins.
