Fujitsu Network announced that various engineers from the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), High-End Computer Networking (HECN) at NASA Goddard Flight Center, Juniper Networks and Fujitsu Network Communications (News - Alert) have all teamed up and successfully completed a live trial of 40 Gbps connections between the University of Maryland campus and facilities in McLean, Virginia. The trial was done using routing and optical equipment from Juniper Networks (News - Alert) and Fujitsu.

 

The current fiber-optic transmission infrastructure is limited to only 10 Gbps. With the practical deployment of 40 Gbps technology in live networks, augmented on-demand high-definition (HD) video and real-time collaboration across the Internet would be much easier. 

 

Opher Kahane, senior vice president and general manager of the High End Systems Business Unit at Juniper Networks, said, “As our customers introduce increasingly innovative and bandwidth-intensive services, technologies such as 40 Gbps can help them scale their networks quickly and efficiently.”

 

The trial leveraged on Juniper’s high-performance T1600 core routers and Fujitsu FLASHWAVE 7500 metro/regional optical networking platforms. Each of these equipments was equipped with 40 Gbps interfaces and the equipment was deployed in MAX’s metro-fiber network. While, MAX joined hands with NASA Goddard, which has expertise in flow rate testing.

 

Fujitsu FLASHWAVE 7500 is a reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM (News - Alert)) that offers three next-generation configurations for flexible network topologies and as well enables multi-degree hub configuration. Juniper’s T1600 is part of company’s T-series core platforms and these T-Series core routers enables sophisticated processing on a true multi-service platform.

 

Fujitsu said that the 40 Gbps test signals were successfully passed across 80 and 56 kilometer spans without any adverse impacts on production traffic, which were running on separate wavelengths. Interface cards were installed and provisioned. The implementation did not require any special configuration settings and no compatibility issues were encountered between optical and routing platforms. All these indicated that the advanced 40 Gbps technology can be deployed quickly, efficiently and with minimal impact to network operations. 

 

Kahane added: “While the T1600 router is already 100 Gbps-ready, the industry standards and specifications that make 100 Gbps possible are still underway. As this demonstration shows, 40 Gbps is ready for deployment today, so customers can immediately leverage this technology to increase the speed of their networks to meet the growing bandwidth demands of critical and efficient research programs.”

 

Pat Gary, leader of HECN, said, “We currently use a 10 Gbps network path, partly provisioned by MAX, between our GSFC-based NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) supercomputer facility and the larger High-End Computing Capability supercomputer facility based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.”

 

According to Gary, the NCCS upgraded its computing capability this year, nearly threefold to 67 teraflops, and next year they expect to nearly double that capability.

 

“These supercomputers are used to run large models to simulate and better understand Earth’s climate and weather, the planet’s relationship with the sun, and the evolution of cosmic phenomena. With the extremely large data sets that must be transferred to other NASA sites and universities across the country for analysis, 40 Gbps links will allow us to improve the efficiency of our research work with real-time collaboration,” Gary explained.

 

The NASA/GSFC HECN team manages the GSFC-based Scientific and Engineering Network (SEN) as a non-mission dedicated high-end computer network. It conducts R&D on network and testbed evaluations with advanced network technologies, protocols and applications. The team’s research contributes to the next generation of high-end computer networks at GSFC and elsewhere in NASA.