News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

Internet2 Demonstrates Interoperability of Multiple Dynamic Circuit
Platforms at SC07

Interoperability to Facilitate Broad Adoption of Dynamic Circuit Platforms
Worldwide 

RENO, Nevada – November 13, 2007 – This week at SC07, the annual
international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage,
and analysis, Internet2, together with several partners and collaborators,
will demonstrate for the first time interoperability of its revolutionary
Dynamic Circuit (DC) Network with multiple regional and international
networks as well as an equipment provider. The demonstration marks a
milestone in facilitating the widespread adoption of dynamic circuit
networking by showcasing how networks with different equipment, network
technology, and allocation models can dynamically provision dedicated
circuits across domains.

Dynamic circuit networks provide on-demand or scheduled dedicated
point-to-point bandwidth to enable the most demanding applications for
research and education—including massive terabyte-sized data transfers and
super high-definition video. In contrast, traditional IP (Internet Protocol)
networks share network capacity among all applications using the network,
which means that demanding applications compete with others for a fixed
amount of bandwidth.

The Internet2 demonstrations will showcase interoperability with ESnet,
GÉANT2 in Europe, the Great Plains Network (GPN), GRNET in Greece, HEAnet in
Ireland, Merit Network, Northern Crossroads (NoX), a Nortel Network based in
Ottawa, Canada, the PIONIER network in Poland, and the Phosphorus testbed at
the University of Amsterdam via SURFnet’s NetherLight GLIF Open Lambda
Exchange in Amsterdam. 

“The Internet2 community has long understood the potential of dynamic
circuits to support a wide range of demanding applications. In today’s
environment, these applications, driven by science and medicine, are global
in nature, so interoperability of dynamic circuit platforms is critical to
supporting their adoption,” said Rick Summerhill, Internet2 chief technology
officer. “Creating standardized protocols to link optical networks across
domains is a major step toward creating a ubiquitous dynamic circuit
infrastructure that can seamlessly support the research of today, and of the
future.”

The Internet2 Dynamic Circuit (DC) Network, unveiled earlier this year, is a
nationwide optical circuit network that provides short term, on-demand
access to dedicated bandwidth up to 10 Gbps to serve the most demanding
network applications like those involved in high-energy physics research,
telemedicine and radio astronomy. The Internet2 DC Network uses
standards-based technologies and protocols developed by its members and
partners to provide dedicated optical paths anywhere and at any time a
researcher, scientist or other potential user may need it. 

For instance, in the near future, 8000 physicists worldwide will participate
in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experimentation operated out of CERN in
Geneva, Switzerland. When operations begin in 2008, LHC will produce
multiple Petabytes of data annually for scientists to access and analyze.
Dynamic circuit networks worldwide will play a critical role in supporting
the high bandwidth data storage and data transmission requirements of the
participating researchers.

The interoperability of the Internet2 DC Network with other dynamic circuit
networks is enabled by the Inter-Domain Controller (IDC) protocol developed
in a collaboration by GÉANT2, Internet2, and ESnet and is used widely in
this community as the standard for interoperable dynamic circuit networking
today. The University of Amsterdam is working to extend the protocol and
other collaborators are expected to participate in further development as
well.

The demonstrations will be showcased continuously from November 12th – 16th
at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. For more information on Internet2 at
SC07, visit: http://events.internet2.edu/2007/sc07/.  

Specifics of each interoperability demonstration include:

High Energy Physics
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments are scheduled to produce
their first data in mid-2008. This particular interoperability demonstration
is in anticipation of the LHC data’s intensive demands on the network from
U.S. collaborators which includes 2 U.S. national laboratories; 15 Tier 2
institutions; 68 Tier 3 institutions; and the 1500 U.S. researchers
participating in the experiments. The demonstration will showcase a large
scale data set transfer between Fermilab, a Tier 1 national laboratory, and
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) a Tier 2 institution. The Fermilab
and Caltech-developed LambdaStation control plane software will interact
with the Internet2 DC Network and ESnet4 to invoke a dynamic circuit set up,
creating a dedicated lightpath from UNL’s network to GPN across the
Internet2 DC Network through the ESnet4 infrastructure and then onto the
Fermilab campus. In addition, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), a LHC
Tier 1 national laboratory, which developed the TeraPaths control software,
will use the technology to create dedicated, QoS aware lightpaths from BNL,
through ESnet and Internet2, to Boston University via NoX and the University
of Michigan via the MiLR/Merit network.

European Multi-Domain Interoperability
Internet2 is working with its collaborators in the U.S. and Europe to
develop and test common aspects of Inter-Domain Controller software.
Internet2 will work with GÉANT2 (the European Research and Education Next
Generation Network), HEAnet: Ireland’s Research and Education Network,
GRNET: Greece’s Research and Education Network, PIONIER: Poland’s Research
and Education Network and Phosphorus: the EU testbed project for optical
networking; to test the dynamic set up of optical circuits to locations in
each of these regions. This interoperability testing will be supported on
the European side by the AutoBAHN (Automated Bandwidth Allocation across
Heterogeneous Networks) architecture developed within the GÉANT2 project.
AutoBAHN enables the dynamic provisioning of user-requested network circuits
upon demand over multiple networks implemented using different technologies
and provisioning policies. High definition video streaming and large file
transfer applications will be initiated from the Internet2 booth to showcase
the capabilities of the dynamic circuit network and its ability to support
next-generation uses of the network.

Nortel Dynamic Resource Allocation Controller (DRAC) Interoperability 
Nortel has a technology product called the Dynamic Resource Allocation
Controller (DRAC) to address next-generation networking concerns around an
application-aware dynamic network. Nortel in collaboration with Internet2
will demonstrate the deployment of the IDC protocol within the DRAC
software, the first ever vendor implementation of the protocol. Nortel is
planning to create an optical connection to Internet2 at Manhattan Landing
exchange point (MAN LAN) in New York City via CANARIE. This path will be
terminated at the SC07 showfloor in Reno with connectivity to both Nortel
and Internet2 booths. At Nortel Labs, the connection will be terminated on
its Metro Ethernet Routing Switch (MERS) 8600 Ethernet Switch and Optical
Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 optical platform. 

This demo shows the ability of the open source IDC implementation to
interoperate with a commercial Network Domain Controller. It also highlights
a proof point of Nortel's DRAC capabilities to participate in an
inter-domain infrastructure, and further establishes the usefulness of the
IDC protocol in enabling widespread adoption of dynamic networks. The
expectation is that Nortel and other companies will participate in ongoing
development of the protocol and will play an instrumental role in deployment
of a global, dynamic, interoperable optical and Ethernet infrastructure.

In addition, the Nortel DRAC software will enable a conference floor
demonstration by creating and releasing circuits between the Nortel booth
and the Internet2 booth on the SC show floor. Using GridFTP, a performance
optimized file transfer program for Grid environments included in the Globus
Toolkit, a dataset consisting of medical data will be transferred over the
application requested on-demand connection. The demo will effectively
saturate the dedicated link, then the link will be taken down. The process
will repeat at regular intervals for benefit of the show attendees.

The University of Amsterdam and CineGrid demonstration 
The University of Amsterdam (UvA), together with SURFnet, one of the
pioneers of hybrid networking, is collaborating with Internet2 to develop
and implement inter-domain authorization between the Phosphorus testbed and
Internet2’s DC Network. UvA’s Token Based Authorization concepts are
introduced in the IDC protocol and software to enable secure authorized
access of lightpaths and video content across multiple domains. Using this
technology UvA will stream on demand CineGrid 1080p HD video from the
University of Amsterdam across SURFnet, NetherLight and Internet2 networks
terminating at the Dutch Pavilion at the SC07 conference. Using dynamically
authorized Gigabit optical paths, researchers will stream video from
Amsterdam to the booth at an average 300 MBit/s bitrate showing
extraordinary quality at full frame rate provided by the predictable
configurable Lightpath networks. For more info please see:
http://www.science.uva.nl/~delaat/sc07

About Internet2(R)
Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the
research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions
of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and
unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development,
deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies. Internet2 brings
the U.S. research and academic community together with technology leaders
from industry, government and the international community to undertake
collaborative efforts that have a fundamental impact on tomorrow's Internet.
For more information: http://www.internet2.edu

Media contact:
Lauren Rotman

202.331.5345

###