News for and about the Internet2 community

[Lauren Rotman <>]

Internet2 and Partners Showcase Breakthrough Cyberinfrastructure To  
Support Science at SC09

Exhibit Demos (Booth# 1355) Focus on Optical Bandwidth on Demand,  
Network Performance and Network Research; Technical Program  
Participation with University of Delaware Highlights New Data  
Throughput Technology

PORTLAND, OR. November 16, 2009 – The focus is on state-of-the-art  
cyberinfrastructure as Internet2 heads to the 23rd consecutive  
Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Oregon. At SC09, Internet2 will  
host four ongoing demonstrations in its booth (#1355) highlighting new  
advanced services, including: a new dynamic circuit network service  
called Internet2 ION, breakthrough tools for the diagnosis of end-to- 
end network performance issues, and pioneering network research. These  
services will also be key enablers to the SCinet network – the massive  
400 Gigabit per second conference network built each year to support  
the thousands of exhibitors and attendees of the SC09 conference.

In addition to an impressive roster of demonstrations, the University  
of Delaware and Internet2 have been selected to participate in the  
renowned SC technical program. The technical program is at the heart  
of SC conferences, and technical papers selected for presentation must  
meet an extremely high standard. The co-authored, “Improving GridFTP  
Performance Using the Phoebus Session Layer,” submitted with the  
University of Delaware, has been accepted for presentation as part of  
the SC09 technical program. The paper, which will be presented on  
Tuesday, 3:30pm PST, Room PB256 in the Oregon Convention Center,  
describes how the Phoebus infrastructure improves end-to-end network  
throughput in high-bandwidth, long-distance network applications— 
specifically, GridFTP, one of the key data movement applications in  
high-performance and grid computing.

Exhibit Demonstration Details:

Internet2 ION enables research—and SC09 demos
The ability to provision high-bandwidth, on-demand circuits is  
increasingly important to a whole range of disciplines, especially  
those that depend on high-volume, distributed data shared among global  
collaborators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments and  
radio astronomy research. Internet2 ION, a revolutionary service that  
allows researchers to create dedicated point-to-point circuits across  
network domains, will not only be featured at SC09, but will support  
extreme network demonstrations from the California Institute of  
Technology, Internet2, NICT, Northrop Grumman, PIONIER and University  
of Amsterdam SC09 exhibit booths. At Internet2 Booth 1355, attendees  
will be able to try out the simple, wizard-like Web interface for  
themselves and set up or tear down live circuits right from the  
exhibition floor. Announced in Fall of 2009, Internet2 ION is built on  
technology developed in collaboration with key partners including  
GÉANT and ESnet, and leverages both OSCARS and DRAGON technology.

pS-Performance Toolkit ensures optimum network performance
To ensure networks that support increasingly massive data transfers  
from leading edge science applications keep performing at optimum  
levels from end to end, Internet2 together with its partners, ESnet,  
Fermilab, Indiana University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and  
the University of Delaware, have recently released pS-Performance  
Toolkit. The toolkit is a suite of services recommended to help  
engineers monitor performance and solve traditionally hard-to-diagnose  
network performance problems, even across domains. The pS-Performance  
Toolkit leverages a perfSONAR infrastructure widely deployed  
throughout the high-performance networking community that supports  
science disciplines like the High Energy Physics community. At  
Internet2’s pS-Performance Toolkit station, the Toolkit’s easy  
installation and “ready-on-boot” functionality will be demonstrated,  
along with its wizard-like configuration interface, performance  
measurement visualization screens, and live, bootable CDs of the  
latest release will be distributed. Also highlighted will be  
perfSONAR’s role in SCinet with a live SCinet network “weathermap”  
showing a real time visualization of the conference network’s traffic.

Live SCinet network traffic visualized using perfSONAR can be viewed  
online at http://measurement.sc09.org/public. Real-time utilization of  
the Internet2 IP link is also being collected and displayed using the  
perfSONAR framework and can be viewed at http://events.internet2.edu/2009/sc09/index.html 
.

OpenFlow addresses unpredictable network traffic patterns
A third Internet2 booth demo station showcases an important network  
research project called OpenFlow that addresses the growing problem of  
unpredictability in network traffic patterns due to ever-increasing  
bandwidth demands, virtualization, remote storage replication,  
increasing mobile network traffic, and the move from circuit-based  
SONET access to packet-based Ethernet access. The OpenFlow  
demonstration, housed in three exhibit booths, Ciena (Booth 1445) ,  
Internet2 (Booth 1355) and the Xnet booth is a cooperative effort with  
Ciena Corporation and Stanford University, and will demonstrate a  
unified control plane for packet and circuit networks based on the  
OpenFlow architecture which separates data and control plane; provides  
a common flow based data path abstraction for layers L0-L4; and a  
control plane API to the network. The demo illustrates how layer 1 and  
2 management can be linked to dynamically respond to the inconstant  
network demands of applications.

Worldview creates a network you can touch
The demo roster will be rounded out by an exciting look into new  
network visualization capabilities developed at the Indiana University  
Global Research Network Operations Center, which provides operations  
support to the Internet2 Network. Worldview is an interactive, 3D  
network visualization system designed to show real-time network  
utilization across multiple networks using the pS-Performance Toolkit.  
Worldview converts Internet2 Network utilization data into a  
specialized markup language, combines it with other geographic data,  
then displays it in a stunning, multi-touch-capable display, giving  
NOC operators a tactile overview of the various layers of the  
Internet2 Network, and providing an intuitive way for them to interact  
with abstract, network-related data sets. Though Worldview’s  
usefulness to network operators is obvious, one of the tool’s most  
important uses is as an effective communications tool for conveying a  
whole range of network characteristics to non-technical network  
owners, sponsors and stakeholders.

ABOUT INTERNET2
Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and  
education community. An exceptional partnership spanning U.S. and  
international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research,  
academia, industry and government, Internet2 is developing  
breakthrough cyberinfrastructure technologies that support the most  
exacting applications of today—and spark the most essential  
innovations of tomorrow. Led by its members and focused on their  
current and future networking needs since 1996, Internet2 blends its  
unsurpassed human, IP and optical networks to develop and deploy  
revolutionary Internet technologies. Activating the same partnerships  
that produced today’s Internet, our community is forging the Internet  
of the future.

For more information, see http://www.internet2.edu.
For more information on Internet2 and SC09, visit:  
http://events.internet2.edu/2009/sc09/


Media Contact:
Lauren Rotman

202.331.5345