ESnet's Expertise Underpins SC16 Conference Events

Each year, more than 10,000 professionals in high performance computing, networking, data storage and analysis convene from around the world at the SC conference. For six days, the latest innovations, technologies and ideas will be shared during SC16 in Salt Lake City.

ESnet’s expertise in networking will be shared in workshop sessions, talks, demonstrations and overall support for the conference. In particular, This year, ESnet is helping provision 600 Gbps of bandwidth (6 x 100G) between ESnet and the SC16 conference, which is more than the network has ever brought up to SCinet in the past. Below is a list of ESnet-related activities at SC16.

Sunday, Nov. 13

Workshop

The Innovating the Network for Data Intensive Science Workshop (INDIS 2016), co-organized by Brian Tierney of ESnet, will feature papers co-authored by ESnet staff:

• Mariam Kiran will present “Enabling Intent to Configure Scientific Networks for High Performance Demands,” a paper she co-authored with Eric Pouyoul, Brian Tierney, Chin Guok and Inder Monga, all of ESnet, and Anu Mercian.
• Eric Pouyoul is a co-author of “mdtmFTP and Its Evaluation on ESnet’s SDN Testbed” with Liang Zhang, Wenji Wu and Phil Demar.
• Nick Buraglio is a co-author of “CoreFlow: Enriching Bro security events using network traffic monitoring data” with Ralph Koning, Cees de Laat and Paola Grosso.

 Tuesday, Nov. 15

DOE booth (1030)

ESnet staff and facilities will be part of a number of talks, demos and discussions in the DOE booth comprising 14 national labs.

Featured presentation

• 4 p.m. “From the Edge to the Core: Scaling Networks to Support Exascale Computing and Data,” Inder Monga, Eli Dart and Chris Tracy

Roundtable discussion

• 4:45 p.m. “400G Deployment over Next-generation Optical Substrate by a National Research & Education Network,” Chris Tracy

Demos

• 10 a.m.  “mdtmFTP @ 100GE Networks,”  Wenji Wu, Fermilab (this demo uses ESnet’s 100G testbed)
• 2 p.m. “InDI: Intent-based User-defined Service Deployment over Multi-Domain SDN Applications.” Mariam Kiran, ESnet/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (this demo uses ESnet and OSCARS)

Interactive Research Highlights (ongoing during exhibit hours)

• “400 Gigabit Super-Channel Networking at ESnet”
• "The Petascale Data Transfer Node (DTN) Project"

SC16 Exhibitor Forum

Jason Zurawski is leading an Exhibitor Forum Area on networking from 3:30-5 p.m. in Room 155-F of the convention center. Presentations are:

• “Secure, Reliable, Congestion Free Transfer of Elephant Flows with Virtual Forwarding Contexts and Real-time Programmable Metering and QoS”
• “Evolution of 400 Gigabit Ethernet and Key Factors Driving Industry Adoption”
• “Next Generation Performance and Scalability with Mellanox SmartInterconnect”

Stanford/SLAC booth (2101)

Talks 3 - 4 p.m.

• The science (Linear Coherent Light Source-II) needs to transfer regularly massive amounts of data (1 Tbit/sec by 2024) from the experiment in Menlo Park (SLAC) to an Exascale computer in Berkeley (NERSC)
• How ESnet is enabling distributed data intensive science and hence LCLS-II
• A demonstration of transferring Lots of Small Files data motivated by LCLS’s need for semi real-time transfer and access to the data acquisition system’s output

Wednesday, Nov. 16

DOE booth (1030)

Demos

• 10 a.m. “mdtmFTP @ 100GE Networks,” Wenji Wu, Fermilab (this demo uses ESnet’s 100G testbed)
• 11 a.m. “InDI: Intent-based User-defined Service Deployment over Multi-Domain SDN Applications.” Mariam Kiran, ESnet/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (this demo uses ESnet and OSCARS)
• 11 a.m. “High Performance File Transfer for Next-generation Science Experiments,” Les Cottrell, SLAC (this demo uses ESnet)
• 12 p.m. “Advance Reservation Access Control using Software-defined Networking and Tokens,” Joaquin Chung, Georgia Tech/Argonne National Laboratory (this demo uses ESnet’s SDN testbed)

Interactive Research Highlights (ongoing during exhibit hours)

• “400 Gigabit Super-Channel Networking at ESnet”
• "The Petascale Data Transfer Node (DTN) Project"

Thursday, Nov.  17

DOE booth (1030)

Interactive Research Highlights (ongoing during exhibit hours)

• “400 Gigabit Super-Channel Networking at ESnet”
• "The Petascale Data Transfer Node (DTN) Project"

 Ongoing during the conference

SCinet

For one week each year, SCinet is one of the most powerful and advanced networks in the world. Created each year for the conference, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources of their home institutions and elsewhere by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications including supercomputing and cloud computing. ESnet staff have long played key roles in the volunteer-driven effort.

Special high-speed connectivity
Normally, ESnet has a cross-country SDN testbed wave that stretches from Chicago (Starlight) to NERSC (Berkeley). For SC16, ESnet split that circuit (which runs directly through Salt Lake City) in order to get 100G from Berkeley to Salt Lake, and 100G from Salt Lake to Chicago (Starlight).

SCinet Network Research Exhibition
Brian Tierney is once again co-chair of the SCinet Network Research Exhibition (NRE), which showcases a number of interesting network-based experiments during SC, including several in the DOE booth. Nick Buraglio is working on an experimental 100G SDN testbed with the SCinet NRE team.

WINS (Women in IT Networking at SC)
ESnet and the National Science Foundation are supporting WINS, a program further expand the diversity of the SCinet volunteer staff and provide professional development opportunities to highly qualified women in the field of networking. Kate Mace is ESnet’s point of contact for WINS, with staffing support from Mary Hester and Lauren Rotman. At SC16, seven women will participate in WINS.

SCinet team members
Nick Buraglio, Evangelos Chaniotakis, Jackson Gor, Zach Harlan and Indira Kassymkhanova, Routing; Michael Dopheide, Network Security; Mary Hester, Edge Network; Nick Buraglio and Brian Tierney, NRE; Scott Richmond and Brendan White, DevOps; Chris Tracy, WAN Transport; Jason Zurawski, Management; Kate Mace, Architecture.

Also joining the SCinet team will be Scott Campbell of NERSC and Aashish Sharma of the IT Divsiion, Network Security; Jason Lee of NERSC, Management; and Michael Smitasin of the IT Division, Routing.

Buraglio and Tierney are advising as needed on the SCinet routing team for their software-defined production network.

Conference commuinications

Lauren Rotman, a member of the SC16 Communications Committee, is serving as producer for the HPC Matters plenary talk and the opening keynote session.

Exhibition demos

ESnet will again be supporting a number of demos in various booths during the conference exhibition. See the accompanying diagram of the ESnet-supported demos.