ESnet taps Ciena for 400G research and education network

Network to support growing demand for data-intensive transfer and research on high energy physics, climate science and genomics.

8 years ago Posted in

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) recently deployed Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by WaveLogic 3 Extreme chipsets, to support its new 400G network. The network will give ESnet the highest levels of transmission available on the market to support NERSC’s 6,000 users as the facility moves to a new location during the next year. ESnet will also use the network to support advanced research on the impact and performance of big data transmission over a variety of fiber and photonic topologies, as well as within high-performance computing systems.

ESnet connects tens of thousands of DOE Office of Science researchers at more than 40 U.S. laboratories and supercomputing facilities to research partners around the world. The network currently carries approximately 34 petabytes of data each month. Traffic on the network has increased an average of 10 times every four years, propelled by the rising tide of data produced by supercomputers, global collaborations that involve thousands of researchers, and specialized facilities like the Large Hadron Collider and digital sky surveys. It is expected that ESnet will need to carry more than 60 petabytes of data per month by 2016.

The 400G network will provide NERSC with uninterrupted connectivity during its transition to a new site located on the main campus of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. It will also support advanced research projects on topics ranging from cosmology to genomics to materials, in addition to generating massive datasets from scientific modeling and simulation.

ESnet has also established a 400G testbed, utilizing fiber from Level 3 Communications, to assess the use of flexible grid technologies, which are being developed to allow service providers to extract additional capacity out of fiber spectrum. The testbed allows ESnet to provide advanced network architecture insights to share with other universities, national laboratories and service providers building next generation networks.

Ciena’s WaveLogic 3 Extreme chipset features 16QAM modulation, which doubles system traffic capacity with 200Gb/s per wavelength and allows for a simple-to-deploy dual subcarrier 400G solution. In addition, Ciena’s Flexible Grid technologies allow ESnet to utilize incremental increases in capacity with the ability to pack more wavelengths on a fiber.

Greg Bell, Director, ESnet, comments: “DOE's Energy Sciences Network, better known as ESnet, has a mission to improve science outcomes by breaking down barriers of geography and making it easier for researchers around the globe to collaborate and share data. Ciena has been instrumental in providing the technology and expertise to support our network, and the new 400G solution will ensure we are able to handle anticipated traffic growth driven by data-intensive collaborations in physics, biology, materials science, climate science and many other fields.”

ESnet taps Ciena for 400G research and education network

Network to support growing demand for data-intensive transfer and research on high energy physics, climate science and genomics.

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