ESnet to Share Expertise at Europe’s Premier Networking Conference

 ESnet staff members Eric Pouyoul, Jon Dugan and Bill Johnston are among the speakers scheduled to present at the 2012 TERENA Networking Conference to be held May 21-24 in Reykjavík, Iceland. The conference, sponsored by the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, is the largest and most prestigious European research networking conference.

The conference will draw over 500 participants including decision makers, networking specialists and managers from all major European networking and research organizations, universities, worldwide sister institutions and industry representatives. ESnet staff have developed formal ties and informal working partnerships with a number of European networks, including the pan-European network GÉANT, SURFnet in the Netherlands, and NORDUnet, the Nordic network.

ESnet presentations are:

“Dynamic creation of end-to-end virtual networks for science and cloud computing leveraging OpenFlow/Software Defined Networking,” by Inder Monga and Eric Pouyoul (presenting). This paper and presentation, ECSEL (End-to-End Circuit SErvice at Layer 2), showcases how software-defined networking (SDN), a new and upcoming paradigm using the OpenFlow protocol, can be leveraged to easily stitch an end-to-end circuit that is application driven, fully automated, and requires the least amount of network administrator involvement while accomplishing spectacular data-transfer results.

“The MyESnet Portal: Making the Network Transparent” by Jon M. Dugan (presenting), Gopal Vaswani and Gregory Bell. ESnet has embarked on My ESnet Portal, a major project to make the network visible by aggregating diverse data sources, exposing them via web services, and presenting them to users through innovative, user-centered interfaces, allowing users to monitor, troubleshoot, and understand the network and its associated services.

“The Square Kilometer Array – A next generation scientific instrument and its implications for networks” by William E. Johnston (presenting) and Roshene McCool, SKA Program Development Office, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. The Square Kilometer Array – SKA – is a radio telescope consisting of several thousand antennae that operate as a single instrument to provide an unprecedented astronomy capability. The SKA will generate an unprecedented amount of data, with individual antenna results in a total data flow of up to 9 petabits per second, which is then reduced to a 100 gigabits-per-second steady-state data flow that must be transported to the collaborators spread around the world. The sheer volume of data and the number of networking components needed to transport the raw and partially processed data are staggering.

Read more about the TNC2012 conference.