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Apr. 30, 2012 — Climate researchers are producing
some of the fastest growing datasets in science.
Five years ago, the amount of information generated
for the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations
International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Fourth Assessment Report was 35 terabytes --
equivalent to the amount of text in 35 million books,
occupying a bookshelf 248 miles (399 km) long. By
2014, when the next IPCC report is published,
experts predict that 2 petabytes of data will have
been generated for it -- that's a 580 percent increase
in data production.
Because thousands of researchers
around the world contribute to the
generation and analysis of this data, a
reliable, high-speed network is needed
to transport the torrent of information.
Fortunately, the Department of Energy's
(DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences
Network) has laid the foundation for
such a network -- not just for climate
research, but for all data-intensive
science.
"There is a data revolution occurring in
science," says Greg Bell, acting director of ESnet, which is
managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Over the
last decade, the amount of scientific data transferred over our
network has increased at a rate of about 72 percent per year,
and we see that trend potentially accelerating."
In an effort to spur U.S. scientific competitiveness, as well as
accelerate development and widespread deployment of
100-gigabit technology, the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI)
was created with $62 million in funding from the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and implemented by
ESnet. ANI was established to build a 100 Gbps national
prototype network and a wide-area network testbed.
To cost-effectively deploy ANI, ESnet partnered with Internet2 --
a consortium that provides high-performance network
connections to universities across America -- which also
received a stimulus grant from the Department of Commerce's
Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program.
Researchers Take a "Test Drive" on ANI
So far more than 25 groups have taken advantage of ESnet's
wide-area testbed, which is open to researchers from
government agencies and private industry to test new, potentially
disruptive technologies without interfering with production
science network traffic. The testbed currently connects three
unclassified DOE supercomputing facilities: the National Energy
Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland,
Calif., the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in
Argonne, Ill., and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
(OLCF) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
"No other networking organization has a 100-gigabit network
testbed that is available to researchers in this way," says Brian
Tierney, who heads ESnet's Advanced Networking Technologies
Group. "Our 100G testbed has been about 80 percent booked
since it became available in January, which just goes to show
that there are a lot of researchers hungry for a resource like this."
Climate 100
To ensure that researchers will use future 100-gigabit effectively,
another ARRA-funded project called Climate 100 brought
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Blue Gene
A warming climate will likely change the statistics of
tropical cyclones and hurricanes. This image
represents one frame from a simulation called
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reproduced observed tropical cyclone statistics.
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A 100-Gigabit Highway for Science: Researchers Take a 'Test Drive' On
ANI Testbed
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2. together middleware and network engineers to develop tools and
techniques for moving unprecedentedly massive amounts of
climate data.
"Increasing network bandwidth is an important step toward
tackling ever-growing scientific datasets, but it is not sufficient by
itself; next-generation high-bandwidth networks need to be
evaluated carefully from the applications perspective as well,"
says Mehmet Balman of Berkeley Lab's Scientific Data
Management group, a member of the Climate 100 collaboration.
According to Balman, climate simulation data consists of a mix of
relatively small and large files with irregular file size distribution
in each dataset. This requires advanced middleware tools to
move data efficiently on long-distance high-bandwidth networks.
"The ANI testbed essentially allowed us to 'test drive' on a
100-gigabit network to determine what kind of middleware tools
we needed to build to transport climate data," says Balman.
"Once the development was done, we used the testbed to
optimize and tune."
At the 2011 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, Wash., the
Climate 100 team used their tool and the ANI testbed to
transport 35 terabytes of climate data from NERSC's data
storage to compute nodes at ALCF and OLCF.
"It took us approximately 30 minutes to move 35 terabytes of
climate data over a wide-area 100 Gbps network. This is a great
accomplishment," says Balman. "On a 10 Gbps network, it would
have taken five hours to move this much data across the
country."
Space Exploration
In 2024, the most powerful radio telescope ever constructed will
go online. Comprising 3,000 satellite dishes spread over 250
acres, this instrument will generate more data in a single day
than the entire Internet carries today. Optical fibers will connect
each of these 15-meter-wide (50 ft.) satellite dishes to a central
high performance computing system, which will combine all of
the signals to create a detailed "big picture."
"Given the immense sensor payload, optical fiber interconnects
are critical both at the central site and from remote stations to a
single correlation facility," says William Ivancic, a senior research
engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "Future radio
astronomy networks need to incorporate next generation network
technologies like 100 Gbps long-range Ethernet links, or better,
into their designs."
In anticipation of these future networks, Ivancic and his
colleagues are utilizing a popular high-speed transfer protocol,
called Saratoga, to effectively carry data over 100-gigabit
long-range Ethernet links. But because it was cost-prohibitive to
upgrade their local network with 100-gigabit hardware, the team
could not determine how their software would perform in a
real-world scenario -- that is, until they got access to the ANI
testbed.
"Quite frankly, we would not be doing these speed tests without
the ANI testbed," says David Stewart, an engineer at Verizon
Federal Systems and Ivancic's colleague. "We are currently in
the development and debugging phase, and have several
implementations of our code. With the ANI testbed, we were able
to optimize and scale our basic PERL implementation to far
higher speeds than our NASA testbed."
End-to-End Delivery
Meanwhile, Dantong Yu, who leads the Computer Science
Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, used the ANI testbed
to design an ultra-high-speed, end-to-end file transfer protocol
tool to move science data at 100 gigabits per second across a
national network.
"A network like ANI may be able to move data at 100 Gbps, but
at each end of that connection there is a host server that either
uploads or downloads data from the network," says Yu. "While
the host servers may be capable of feeding data into the network
and downloading it at 100 Gbps, the current software running on
these systems is a bottleneck."
According to Yu, the bottlenecks are primarily caused by the
number of times the current software forces the computer to
make copies of the data before uploading it to the network.
"Initially I was testing this protocol at a very local lab level. In this
scenario transfers happen in a split-second, which is far from
reality," says Yu. "ANI allowed me to see how long it really takes
to move data across the country, from East-to West Coast, with
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my software, which in turn helped me optimize the code."
The Next Steps
Within the next few months, the official ANI project will be coming
to an end, but the community will continue to benefit for decades
to come from its investments. The 100-gigabit prototype network
will be converted into ESnet's fifth-generation production
infrastructure, one that will be scale to 44 times its current. ESnet
will also seek new sources of funding for the 100-gigabit testbed
to ensure that it will be available to network researchers on a
sustained basis.
"Since its inception, ESnet has delivered the advanced
capabilities required by DOE science. Many of these capabilities
are cost-prohibitive, or simply unavailable, on the commercial
market," says Bell. "Because our network is optimized for the
needs of DOE science, we're always looking for efficient ways to
manage our large science flows. ESnet's new 100-Gigabit
network will allow us to do that more flexibly and morecost-
effectively than ever."
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(2012, April 30). A 100-gigabit highway for
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/2012/04/120430152134.htm
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