Cern, the world's largest particle physics laboratory,
has built the first working intercontinental 10 Gigabit Ethernet
wide area network. It will ultimately make up part of the fabric of
the next-generation internet, dubbed Internet2.
Cern's Wan is based on the Terascale E-Series family of switches
and routers, which underpin a high-performance grid computing farm
with a data throughput of up to 2.4 terabits per second.
The computing farm is based in Geneva and made up of between
6,000 and 8,000 Intel-based Linux servers and 2,000 storage
devices, co-ordinated by technology from Force10 Networks.
Cern's computing system will be able to process large amounts of
data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator,
which is due to go online in 2007. The LHC will rely on data from
the server farm, and use the transatlantic infrastructure to send
out information to what Cern calls tier-one locations.
The 11 tier-one locations comprise some of the world's largest
and most complex research networks, including TeraGrid, the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the California
Institute of Technology and the Korea Institute of Science and
Technology Information.
The Force10 Terascale E-Series will also provide 10 Gigabit
Ethernet connections to Cern's multiple-campus-based experiments,
which comprise individual computing clusters.
Prior to 2007, Cern will be ramping up use of this
infrastructure, increasing the load and usage to test and debug the
system.
The whole system is a set of federated grids, said David Foster,
communications systems and networking group leader at Cern. The
individual grid initiatives form part of a larger picture - a
high-speed internet capable of hosting high-quality graphics,
streaming video and vast amounts of transactional data.
Cern's project is part of the LHC Computing Grid Initiative, and
EU projects such as Enabling Grids for E-Science.
Foster said, "This is a technology that is evolving, with the
academic and scientific arenas pushing it forward and showing that
it is really usable in a production environment. The industrial
applications for this will come along later as a wave of production
grids for many areas of science, though it is applicable in other
areas, such as financial analysis. We can expect a ramp-up of
uptake as the technology matures and as the business models become
defined."
He said there had been a great increase in connectivity and
bandwidth the world over, which was bringing in new ways of doing
science and engaging more people in the process.
"It is taking the science to the scientists because you can move
data across the globe very cost effectively. Scientists can work
more locally than ever before. The grid infrastructure is the tool
that facilitates this," he said.
Cern employs 2,600 people. Its most famous alumnus is scientist
Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 invented the world wide web to meet
the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists
working in different universities and institutes around the
world.
What is Internet2?
Cern's 10 Gigabit Ethernet wireless area network will link into
the Internet2 initiative, which is based on other 10 Gigabit
Ethernet networks. Internet2 is a consortium led by 207
universities working in partnership with industry and government to
develop and deploy advanced network applications and
technologies.
One of the projects to come out of Internet2 is Abilene, part of
the Internet2 backbone network, and a system that enables US-wide
testing of applications such as uncompressed high-definition
TV-quality video; remote control of scientific instruments such as
mountaintop telescopes and electron microscopes; collaboration
using immersive virtual reality; and grid computing.