RENCI’s BEN(Breakable Experimental

Network)Chris Heermannckh@renci.org

Renaissance Computing Institute

• RENCI vision– a multidisciplinary institute

• academe, commerce and society– broad in scope and participation

• Objectives– enrich and empower human potential

• faculty, staff, students, collaborators– create multidisciplinary partnerships

• science, engineering and computing• commerce, humanities and the arts

– develop and deploy leading infrastructure• driven by collaborative opportunities

– enable and sustain economic development• Multidisciplinary team model

– scientists, creative artists, and computing researchers– exploring new approaches to old and new problems

RENCI Profile• Funding and staff

– ~$25M annual budget• $11M in state funding

– ~100 staff across multiple sites• Locations

– Europa anchor site– Engagement sites

• NCSU, Duke and UNC-CH• ECU, UNCA, UNCC

• Major statewide thrusts– Disaster response– Health care

• Collaborative projects– Arts, science, engineering

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Network research at RENCI• New group, actively expanding• Independent research with external funding

– NSF FIND• SILO project in collaboration with NCSU

– DARPA CORONET• Supporting role to HPC and Visualization research at

RENCI• Actively engaging with a large pool of research

talent at Triangle Universities– BEN initiative

BEN (Breakable Experimental Network)

• BEN is an experimental fiber facility• Will support experimentation at metro scale

– Distributed applications researchers– Networking researchers

• Not a production network– Enabling disruptive technologies

• Shared by the researchers at the three Triangle Universities– Coarse-grained time sharing is the primary mode for

usage– Assumes some experiments must be granted exclusive

access to the infrastructure

Tech

nolo

gy In

nova

tion

Researcher Control of Resources High

High

Low

e.g., Service ProviderStatic NetworkingCommodity InternetHigh availability (>.99)

e.g., I2, NLRAdvanced servicesHigh Performance Applications ResearchExpected reliability

e.g., Network ResearchLayer 1-7 configurabilityVertical integration capabilityNew technology testingHybrid/complex networksReliability for experiment

Production Network

R&E Network

Breakable Network

Network Types

BEN Fiberprint

Connect RENCI Engagement Sites over BEN

BEN Fiber Responsibilities

• Cooperative effort between NCREN, Duke, NCSU, UNC and RENCI• Initial use case is to connect RENCI’s engagement sites

BEN Systems Architecture

BEN Network Node• Space and power

– 2-3 7’ racks at each location– PDUs - Remote Power

Management• Programmable, Experimental

Layer 1/2/3• Configurable Layer 1/2/3• Configurable Optical Facility

BEN Ecosystem

IBM Blue Gene/L Cluster2,048 compute nodes11.4 TF peak performance70 Dell PowerEdge 1955 blades35 compute nodes running Linux

TUCASI ResearchStorage System200TB in Phase I1.5PB in Phase IIGigE and 10GigE

Rear-projection vis wallsHD stereoscopic projectionsystem

Social computing roomDome display4K projection room

BEN Redux• Reconfigurable optical plane• Researcher equipment access at all layers

– Down to raw fiber– Install experimental equipment

• Equipment with exposible APIs• GMPLS support• Connectivity with substantial non-production resources• Connectivity to National R&E networks

– NLR 10GigE FrameNet– Internet2 and NLR using NCREN

• Enabling research all the way to Type 6 as identified in GDD-06-26– Access to raw fiber bandwidth. E.g. new transmission, modulation,

coding and formats

BEN governance and usage

• BEN is a shared resource for advancing the state of experimental science in the Triangle

• BEN is controlled by the researchers running experiments on it

• Resource allocation and management is done entirely by the researchers themselves

Planned Near-term Research on BEN

• Enabling remote HD visualization– Multi-screen HD viswalls with data striped across

multiple wavelengths• 4K video distribution

– Transporting 4xHD signal across the network• Cross-layer interactions

– Interactions between the optical plane and the packet forwarding plane

– RENCI + NCSU + Keren Bergman (Columbia)• GENI-alization of resources

– Extension of ORCA/COD project from Duke [Jeff Chase]– RENCI + Duke

Longer-term research on BEN

• Hybrid multicast– Optical + electronic

• Metro cluster interconnects– Distributed datacenter

• Introduction of wireless extensions• Format-agnostic optical transport• Just-in-time signaling

Thank youckh@renci.org