Scientific
Applications:
UCSD SELECTED NATIONAL INTERNET2
TECHNOLOGY EVALUATION CENTER
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at
UCSD has been selected by
Internet2 as a national Internet2 Technology
Evaluation Center (ITEC).
The mission of the center will be to test and
evaluate leading-edge
technologies for high-performance Internet2
networks-working with
developers to test and refine network hardware and
software for optimal
end-to-end network performance up to 10 gigabits per
second. Internet2
is a consortium led by more than 200 U.S. universities,
working with
industry and government to develop and deploy advanced Internet
applications and technologies.
The ITEC program was created by the
University Corporation for Advanced
Internet Development (UCAID), the
coordinator of the Internet2 program,
to establish national network-testing
laboratories for users of the
nationwide high-performance Internet2 network
infrastructure. The three
ITEC sites are located at SDSC, ITEC-Ohio at The
Ohio State University,
and NC-ITEC at North Carolina State University's
Centennial Campus.
The point of coordination for the California ITEC
will be SDSC's Network
Performance Reference Lab (NPRL), which evaluates
networking technology,
including 10-gigabit Ethernet, QoS (quality of
service), and RMON
(remote monitoring). The NPRL also studies application
performance
profiling technologies. Internet2 members deploy advanced
applications
in these and other areas on a regular basis.
As a result
of industry partnerships and support from such companies as
Spirent
Communications, Cisco Systems, Force10 Networks, Foundry Networks,
Hewlett-Packard, NetIQ, NetOptics, NetScout Systems, and others, the NPRL is
capable of testing network technologies at data rates ranging from 10 megabits
per second to 10 gigabits per second.
One area for investigation by
the California ITEC will be the end-to-end
network performance between
computers using Abilene and other
high-performance networks, which serve
academic, government, and diverse
research institutions across the United
States.
The ITEC will work to eliminate network problems, software
conflicts, and
interrupted or degraded service. The center will address those
difficulties by
testing new network hardware, network components, and new
software packages
and updates before they are deployed.
"The
California ITEC is especially interested in contributing to the
Internet2
End-to-End Initiative," said Kevin Walsh, director of the
California ITEC and
the NPRL. Walsh is a network engineer at SDSC, the
lead site of the National
Partnership for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (NPACI), a nationwide
consortium of 41 research
institutions that provide open computational
resources for scientific
discoveries.
"The capabilities we have
developed within the NPRL can be leveraged to
support the initiative, which in
turn benefits our NPACI partners. All of the
NPACI university partners use the
Abilene network to access SDSC and other
NPACI partner sites," said Walsh.
Although advanced networks such as Abilene provide raw bandwidth several
orders of magnitude beyond today's commercial Internet, users still
experience
problems with the overall transfer of information from point
to point. The
Internet2 End-to-End Performance Initiative was created to
help solve the
"Wizard Gap," which refers to the difference in
experiences between people
with specialized technical know-how, who can
use a system to its full
potential, versus average users who often
endure unreliable service,
unnecessarily slow data transfers, and other
problems because they don't how
to "tune" the system optimally.
The goal of the initiative is to
create a well supported environment in which
Internet2 campus network users
can routinely expect successful experiences in
their development and use of an
advanced Internet by focusing resources and
efforts on improving
performance-problem detection and resolution throughout
campus, regional, and
national networking infrastructures.
"The new Internet2 Test and
Evaluation Center at SDSC establishes for
the Internet2 community an important
focal point for pushing the
envelope of high-performance, end-to-end
networking," said Cheryl
Munn-Fremon, director of the Internet2 End-To-End
Performance
Initiative.
"The efforts of the ITEC at SDSC will help us
understand how to provide
advanced applications with the reliable
high-performance networking they
require, but don't always get today."
About Internet2
Internet2 is a collaborative effort by more than
200 U.S. research
universities, in partnership with industry leaders and
federal agencies,
to develop a new family of advanced networking applications
to meet new
academic requirements in research, teaching, and learning.
A project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development
(UCAID), Internet2 provides leadership and direction for advanced networking
development within the U.S. university community. Its programs are devoted to
network research, technology transfer, and collaborative activities in related
fields such as distance learning and educational technology.
http://www.internet2.edu
About
the San Diego Supercomputer Center
SDSC is a national laboratory
whose mission is to develop and apply
high-performance information
technologies for science and society. A
research unit of the University of
California, San Diego, SDSC provides
leadership both nationally and
internationally in high-performance
computing, networking, data management,
and numerous scientific fields
that depend on advanced simulations and data
analyses. SDSC is one of
the original nodes of the National Science
Foundation's new TeraGrid,
the world's largest, fastest, distributed
infrastructure for open
scientific research, which will be distributed at five
sites across the
United States and linked by ultra-high-speed networks to
function as a
unified system.
SDSC also is home to several other
nationally known networking research
groups, including the Cooperative
Association for Internet Data Analysis
(CAIDA), the National Laboratory for
Applied Network research (NLANR), and the
Pacific Institute for Computer
Security. UCSD is home to the California
Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2], and
the Center for Wireless
Communications.
SDSC is funded by the National Science Foundation,
other government agencies,
the state of California, the University of
California, and private
organizations.
http://www.sdsc.edu
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