Communications of the ACM
Berkeley Lab Gets $62m to Build Blazing Ethernet Network
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been awarded $62 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to develop what it says will be the world's fastest computer network. The lab will use the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) to build a prototype 100 Gbps Ethernet network to connect DOE supercomputer centers at speeds 10 times faster than today's ESnet.
ESnet currently serves an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 DOE researchers and more than 18,000 non-DOE researchers from universities, government agencies, and private industry.
"This network will serve as a pilot for a future network-wide deployment of 100 Gbps Ethernet in research and commercial networks and represents a major step toward DOE's vision of a 1-terabit--1,000 times faster than 1 gigabit--network interconnecting DOE Office of Science supercomputer centers," says DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research head Michael Strayer.
ESnet recently announced a bandwidth reservation system called On-Demand Secure Circuit and Advanced Reservation System (OSCARS), which automatically collects information on the network's topology once an hour and determines if there are physical changes in the network, and updates its database accordingly. When a new reservation is received, OSCARS checks the database for conflicts with existing requests and reserves a path for information to travel.
From Network World
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Abstracts Copyright © 2009 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA 
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