Successful trial of 40 Gbps network connection

Engineers from the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), High-End Computer Networking (HECN) at NASA Goddard Flight Center (NASA/GSFC), Juniper Networks, Inc. and Fujitsu Network Communications have successfully completed a live trial of 40 Gbps connections between the University of Maryland campus and facilities in McLean, Va of USA. While most of today's fiber-optic transmission infrastructure is limited to 10 Gbps, widespread implementation of 40 Gbps technology in live networks could help provide the scale needed to support the proliferation of advanced services such as on-demand high-definition video and real-time collaboration across the Internet.

Equipment used in the trial included Juniper's high-performance T1600 core routers and Fujitsu FLASHWAVE® 7500 metro/regional optical networking platforms, each equipped with 40 Gbps interfaces. The equipment was deployed in MAX's metro-fiber network, and MAX teamed with long-time collaborator NASA Goddard for their expertise in flow rate testing. 40 Gbps test signals were successfully passed across 80 and 56 kilometer spans without any adverse impacts on production traffic running on separate wavelengths. Once the interface cards were installed and provisioned, they required no special configuration settings and encountered no compatibility issues between optical and routing platforms-proving that cutting edge 40 Gbps technology can be deployed quickly, efficiently and with minimal impact to network operations.

"We currently use a 10 Gbps network path, partly provisioned by MAX, between our GSFC-based NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) supercomputer facility and the larger High-End Computing Capability supercomputer facility based at NASA's Ames Research Center in California," said HECN leader Pat Gary. "This year the NCCS upgraded its computing capability nearly threefold to 67 teraflops, and next year they expect to nearly double that capability. These supercomputers are used to run large models to simulate and better understand Earth's climate and weather, the planet's relationship with the sun, and the evolution of cosmic phenomena. With the extremely large data sets that must be transferred to other NASA sites and universities across the country for analysis, 40 Gbps links will allow us to improve the efficiency of our research work with real-time collaboration."