High-throughput computing for international particle physics collaborations requires the ability to transport large amounts of data quickly around the world. Fermilab has long engaged in network R&D in support of its mission and today boasts 100-gigabit connectivity to local, national and international wide-area networks.
Current network research projects are listed below.
WireCAP
Network security tools, and many other types of applications, depend on packet capture to analyze Internet data packets. In high-speed networks, conventional software-based packet capture engines become susceptible to packet drops. Any packet drops will degrade the accuracy and integrity of these tools. There is a need for cheap lossless packet capture technology that can be used in high-speed networks.
Fermilab has developed WireCAP: A novel packet capture engine for commodity network interface cards (NICs) in high-speed networks. WireCAP provides an effective and efficient solution to address the packet drop problem in high-speed networks by exploiting multi-queue NICs and multi-core architecture. Read more about WireCAP.
Multicore-Aware Data Transfer Middleware (MDTM)
The MDTM project aims to accelerate data movement at multicore systems. It addresses inefficiencies in existing data movement tools when running on multicore systems by harnessing multicore parallelism to scale data movement on end systems. The MDTM project is being carried out at Fermilab and Brookhaven National Laboratory. It is sponsored and funded by DOE’s Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Program. Read more about MDTM.
BigData Express
The BigData Express project aims to provide schedulable, predictable, and high-performance data transfer service for DOE large-scale science computing facilities (LCF, NERSC, US-LHC computing facilities, etc.) and collaborators. This project is funded by DOE’s ASCR Network Research Program. Fermilab is collaborating with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on this project. Read more about BigData Express.
SDN for End-to-end Networked Science at the Exascale (SENSE)
The SENSE project focuses on establishing an inter-domain Software-Defined Networking (SDN) framework. This project is funded by DOE’s Office of Science ASCR Program. Fermilab is collaborating with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Argonne National Lab, Caltech, UMD/MAX, NERSC and ESnet on this project.