Ultranet will link scientists and supercomputers at 40 Gbps
November 26, 2003 | Source: KurzweilAI
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory will design a high-speed network called Science Ultranet that operates at up to 40 gigabits per second, ORNL has announced.
With $4.5 million funding from the Department of Energy, Science UltraNet will allow for distributed collaborative visualization, remote instrument control, and remote computational steering, which allows scientists to control and guide computations being run on supercomputers from their offices. These tasks require high-speed transfer of large amounts of data. Today’s networks lack adequate capacity and are based on software and protocols that were not designed for petascale (millions of gigabytes) data, according to ORNL.
“For example, with today’s networks, data generated by the terascale supernova initiative in two days would take two years to transfer to collaborators at Florida Atlantic University,” said Nageswara Rao of ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division.
High-energy physics, climate modeling, nanotechnology, fusion energy, astrophysics and genomics will be among the disciplines that benefit from this technology.