Testbed and experiments for high-performance networking

Abstract

UltraScience Net is a network research testbed for supporting the development and testing of wide-area networking technologies for high-performance computing and storage systems. It provides dynamic, dedicated, high-bandwidth channels to support large data transfers, and also provides stable high-precision channels to support fine command and control operations. Its data-plane consists of 8,600 miles of crosscountry dual OC192 backbone, which can be dynamically provisioned at different bandwidths. Its out-of-band control-plane is implemented using hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices. In terms of the testbed infrastructure, it demonstrated the following capabilities: (i) ability to build and operate national-scale switched network testbeds, (ii) provisioning of suites of 1 and 10 Gbps connections of various lengths up to 70,000 and 8,600 miles, respectively, through automated scripts, (iii) secure control-plane for signaling and management operations, and (iv) bandwidth scheduler for in-advance connection reservation and provisioning. A number of structured and systematic experiments were conducted on this facility for the following tasks: (i) performance analysis and peering of layer 1-3 connections and their hybrid concatenations, (ii) scalability analysis of 8Gbps InfiniBand (IB) transport over widearea connections of thousands of miles, (iii) diagnosis of TCP performance problems in using dedicated connections to supercomputers, (iv) detailed TCP performance analysis of wide-area application acceleration devices, and (v) TCP throughput improvements due to 10Gbps High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryptor (HAIPE) devices. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2011.