UltraScience Net: Network testbed for large-scale science applications

UltraScienceNet is an experimental wide area network testbed to enable the development of networking technologies required for next-generation large-scale scientific applications. It provides on-demand dedicated high-bandwidth channels for large data transfers, and also high-resolution high-precision channels for fine control operations. In the initial deployment its data plane consists of several thousand miles of dual 10 Gb/s lambdas. The channels are provisioned on demand using layer 1 and 2 switches in the backbone and multiple service provisioning platforms at the edges in a flexible configuration using a secure control plane. A centralized scheduler is employed to compute future channel allocations, and a signaling daemon is used to generate the configuration signals to switches at appropriate times. The control plane is implemented using an out-of-band virtual private network, which encrypts the switching signals, and also provides authenticated user and application access. Transport experiments are conducted on a smaller test connection that provides us useful information about the basic properties and issues of utilizing dedicated channels in applications.