Researchers Demonstrate Long-haul 40 Gigabit Ethernet

Ciena, Mellanox Technologies, SURFnet and the University of Amsterdam have demonstrated long-haul 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) network connections at the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF)'s 10th annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.


For the demonstration, the organizations created a network using an existing 1650 km production-quality SURFnet link, connecting an experimental high-performance computer cluster equipped with a Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN 40GbE NIC at the University of Amsterdam to a remote data processing unit with a corresponding interface at the GLIF meeting venue. The demonstration pushed 26 Gbps (the practical limit of the PCIe bus) from the processor in Amsterdam to the processor at CERN through a single optical wave lambda. The network infrastructure was based on Ciena's Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 equipped with 40GbE interfaces, which was seamlessly upgraded from a 10 Gbps optical lambda to a 40 Gbps optical lambda with no added signal regeneration or modifications to the existing infrastructure.


"The novelty of this work is the new unobstructed 40 Gbps single channel bandwidth between compute nodes implemented directly on a lambda network. This marks the next step in the growth of long-haul communication capacity for distributed data processing," said Cees de Laat, professor in system and network engineering at the University of Amsterdam. "These capacities are essential not only for data intensive e-Science but also, for example, in high-resolution 3D digital cinema and movie processing. The photonic network vision and technology as developed by Ciena integrates the communication building blocks seamlessly with the rest of the e-Infrastructure."http://www.ciena.com
http://www.surfnet.nl