Communications of the ACM
Esnet Launches Architecture to Help Researchers Deliver on Data-Intensive Science
Eli Dart
Key to the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network's (ESnet's) effort to supply reliable high-bandwidth network services to thousands of scientists to manage their swelling data sets is a network design model, the Science DMZ, that functions as a local networking infrastructure geared toward accelerating the delivery of scientific data.
ESnet's Science DMZ initiative is led by Eli Dart, who says the model is fundamentally "an element of the overall network architecture, typically a dedicated portion of a site or campus network, located as close to the network perimeter as possible, that serves only high-performance science applications."
Dart notes the Science DMZ must be constructed with capable equipment that accommodates high-rate flows without dropping packets, while data transfer is performed on dedicated servers. The model also requires a test-and-measurement infrastructure, enabling the identification of any problems that may be disrupting performance. The final Science DMZ component is a security policy customized to scientific applications rather than to general-purpose business computing.
Dart says ESnet is expected to carry more than 100 petabytes of data per month within three years, and "the challenge is to figure out how to get the science done without spending the bulk of your time doing data management."
From HPC Wire
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