SCIENCE

NASA and NOAA are demonstrating the potential of 100 gigabit per second (Gbps) networking and its importance in delivering scientific datasets, climate analysis, environmental data, and atmospheric predictions. Designed for SC10, a supercomputing conference taking place this week in New Orleans, the demonstration relies on cPacket Networks as the key technology to monitor network traffic and assure reliability.

“Computer simulation and modeling have become critical to our understanding of the earth’s systems,” said Paul Love of the Cherokee Services Group and a consultant to NOAA on academic and research networking. “We are increasingly dependent on high-speed networks to enable critical computations. cPacket’s technology allows us to monitor and protect our network and ensure that there are no performance or reliability issues that hinder our mission.”

The 100 Gbps demonstration was developed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the NASA Ames Research Center in conjunction with NOAA. It highlights the networking technology necessary to meet the upcoming demands of climate modeling and space exploration (the datasets for which can be several hundred terabytes). The ability to monitor high-rate network traffic at a granular level in real-time is key to assuring performance and reliability.

“100 Gbps scalability is important for agencies like NOAA and NASA,” said Computer Science Corporation’s Dave Hartzell, a network engineer at the Ames Research Center. “cPacket’s technology allows us to measure performance, detect issues and deliver quality assurance for our complex and distributed computing infrastructure.”

cPacket is providing cVu 320 Traffic Monitoring Switches to both NASA and NOAA for the demonstration which use, among others, high quality optical transceivers provided by Finisar.