“Several months ago, I challenged the Internet2 team to see if we could do something extraordinary with live 400GbE at SuperComputing 2018. SCinet is a perfect opportunity to collaborate and try out new technologies that give people a peek into the future.” ~ Rob Vietzke, Internet2 VP of Network Services
The annual SuperComputing (SC) Conference brings together members of the international high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis community to share the latest applied scientific research, technologies, and ideas. SCinet, the dedicated high-capacity network infrastructure supporting the SC Conference, has pushed the boundaries of networking technologies and innovations since its inception in 1991, and this year’s conference in Dallas was no exception. It’s a collaborative effort by 225 volunteer experts from 85 organizations that span industry, academia and government.
As the technical infrastructure needs of the high-performance computing and research communities continue to evolve, the engineers working to support those needs are continually looking for ways to deliver more network bandwidth more efficiently and with greater programmability, telemetry and security. One technology that’s been of interest to engineers is 400 gigabit Ethernet.
Q: Why is Internet2 so intimately involved with the SuperComputing Conference every year?
The SC Conference is unlike any other conference in the world from my perspective. It’s the premier conference where the brightest people across widely diverse communities discuss advancements in science, high performance computing, information technology and operations of systems supporting high end research each year. There is incredible energy as people come together and invetiably share experiences that lead to new ideas. The continuous cross-pollination and professional development that happens between the participants and volunteers is an invaluable experience.
Q: What were some of the technologies showcased at the SuperComputing Conference this year?
There are increasingly much deeper integrations of science applications, HPC and networking that are accelerating science and making it more accessible to more researchers. Growth in public cloud usage by researchers also has pushed us to figure out new and unique ways to integrate cloud and community resources. With the advent of 400GbE optical systems becoming available, it was a perfect time to demonstrate the future capabilities that 400GbE can bring to our community. Another demonstration showed traffic optimization applications with dynamic signaling across IP and open optical line systems.
Q: How do you see the growing use of telemetry helping to manage and facilitate networks?
One thing we are looking at is using real-time telemetry to understand utilization and opportunities for capacity management. Analyzing telemetry can help us make real-time decisions about how best to move traffic around on these massively high bandwidth WAN links. An important feature of the Internet2 Network is the availability of an enormous amount of headroom capacity to enable large data transfers to move quickly. Using telemetry to steer some of these flows will allow us to better distribute these flows more evenly across available capacity and further extend performance for large data transfers.
Q: Can you elaborate on Juniper’s involvement at SC18?
We’re always looking to explore new technologies like 400GbE and understand their strengths and limitations before they are commercially available. Companies like Juniper Networks have been willing to allow us to test 400GbE in a heterogenous setting like SCinet which provides invaluable early insight into where these technologies are headed. The opportunity to experiment with real world traffic over pre-production 400GbE with Juniper routers and switches was critical to help us prepare for the next advancements in networking performance. We’re very grateful that Juniper was able to provide the QFX5200, QFX10003 and PTX10003 to SCinet. Allowing us to put real traffic over this 400G metro link for SC provides a great early experience with 400GbE.
