Abstract
UltraScience Net is a national-scale network test-bed to support the development of high-performance networking technologies for large-scale applications. It
provides dynamic, dedicated, high-bandwidth channels for large data transfers, and stable high-precision channels for fine control operations. Its data-plane consists of 8,600 miles of cross-country dual OC192 backbone connections, and its control-plane is implemented using hardware VPNs. In terms of infrastructure, it demonstrated the following capabilities: (i) ability to build and operate stable national-scale switched networks, (ii) provisioning of suites of 1 and 10 Gbps connections of various lengths up to 35,000 and 8,600 miles, respectively, through automated scripts (iii) secure control-plane for signaling and management operations, and (iv) bandwidth scheduler for in-advance connection reservation and provisioning. Structured and systematic experiments were conducted on this network facility to accomplish the following tasks: (i) performance analysis and peering of layer 1-3 connections as well as their hybrid concatenations, (ii) scalability analysis of Infiniband transport over wide-area connections of thousands of miles, (iii) diagnosis of TCP performance problems in using dedicated connections to supercomputers, (iv) development of transport methods for dedicated connections, and (v) detailed TCP performance analysis of wide-area application acceleration devices.
