November 2011

Pacific Wave @ SC11

CENIC and PNWGP hosted a Pacific Wave booth #6106 located on Level6 of the Seattle Convention Center during the recent Supercomputing Conference November 13-18, 2011.

Several Pacific Wave participants used the Pacific Wave infrastructure for demonstrations within their Supercomputing booths. There were some issues with the VLANs allocated to participants due to some incompatibilities in the hardware donated to SCinet for the network. Traffic over the dedicated 10-gigabit link was lightly used during Supercomputing.

Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) used multiple 10 gigs into their booth and a 100 gig from University of Victoria, Canada. During their tests they used a set of 2x40GE and 2x40GE highly tuned servers to receive network traffic at rate of approximately 98Gbps. This demonstration did not involve Pacific Wave infrastructure.

Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) and Caltech participated in the DYNES Collaborative demonstration to show how the instrument can be quickly deployed among different participants and used to do massive data transfers. This experiment did utilize Pacific Wave capacity. For more on both demonstrations, see: http://supercomputing.caltech.edu/.

The data reservoir project was featured at the University of Tokyo booth. The university was part of a team that received the ACM Gordon Bell prize for their “K computer” research results.

The NICT Booth demonstrated a 3-D perfSONAR Weather Map showing the Transpac, JGN-X and SX-Transport links across the Pacific into Pacific Wave. A larger picture is shown in the perfSONAR section below. Utilizing bandwidth over Pacific wave, NICT displayed space weather forecast computing, a demonstration with dynamic network path creation protocols and sensor networking.

Also in the NICT booth, the NTT GEMNET researchers prepared and ran an experiment using multiple paths and links to understand the optimum packet size for super high definition transmissions. Preliminary results show that the optimum packet size was 1000KB, which is non-standard size. Jan Eveleth has asked for a copy of the report when they complete it. They are planning on using this technology to broadcast the Summer Olympics in London next summer.

November 2010

Pacific Wave supports SC10 Demonstrations

During the recent Supercomputing 2010 Conference in New Orleans, LA, USA, Pacific Wave supported demonstrations in participant network booths.

Activities included:

  • The GLIF "Automated GOLE Pilot" Project is an experimental project to automate provisioning of point-to-point VLANs (as lightpaths) across multiple GLIF GOLES and administrative domains. Participants in this project include JGN2 and Caltech (via Pacific Wave), StarLight, Netherlight, MANLAN, CzechLight, CERN, NorduNet, PSNC, and the University of Amsterdam.
  • NTT and KDDI, using the PRESTA 10G Platform, demonstrated how they can dynamically switch circuits to improve steaming quality during a live presentation.
  • KAUST, EVL, and CalIT2 streamed data onto the SC10 showroom floor to demonstrate a variety of developments.
  • NICT, collaborating with Kyushu University, NTT GEMNET, the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and Osaka University presented live images from Japan and detailed PerfSONAR data renderings, including a 3-D version.

September 2010

Super Hi-Vision TV broadcast held on September 29, 2010

For more see Featured Projects on Current Participants page.

March 2010

Enhancing Student Exchange Experiences with High Definition Videoconference wins CENIC Innovation in Networking Award

Monash University in Australia and the University of California, San Diego have added high-definition videoconferencing to their respective exchange programs, enabling transformative experiences for students and faculty that would not otherwise have been possible. HD video allows mentors at UCSD to attend final student seminars that are presented both to audiences at Monash and their mentors at UCSD concurrently. Thus, they receive feedback from both Monash and UCSD mentors, significantly enhancing the outcomes of their internship. Likewise, Monash students at UCSD present final seminars back to their mentors in Australia whilst presenting to a local audience at UCSD. Monash University's program goes a step further by adding an advanced seminar scheme, in which students attend seminars given by world leading experts before they depart Australia. The seminar scheme is novel, because it makes it feasible to attract some of the world's best researchers "virtually" to Monash.

Monash's Chancellor, Dr Alan Finkel, wrote recently of his experience attending one of these seminars, "I've participated in numerous video conferences to date but nothing like this. The quality was so high that the experience was almost as if we were all in the same room."

For more information on the CENIC Innovations in Networking Awards see CENIC 2010 Awards.

December 2009

Pacific Wave Director named to IAC of CNIC

Jacqueline Brown, Pacific Wave’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, has been named as a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. On 2 December 2009, at the CNIC Peer Review which Jacqueline chaired at the request of Director Huang Xiangyand, she was awarded her Letter of Appointment by Professor Yan Baoping, Senior Research Fellow and Chief Engineer of CNIC.

Jacqueline also co-chaired the 2009 Chinese-American Networking Symposium along with Prof. Li Xing of Tsinghua University and CERNET and Prof. Qian Hualin of CNIC. The Symposium was held in Beijing 3-5 December. Its main topics were Clean Slate, Evolutional, and Incremental Solutions for the Internet and Cloud Computing.

November 2009

Driving E-Research Collaboration Across the Pacific

The TransLight/PacificWave project and AARNet will be co-sponsoring a workshop "Driving E-Research Collaboration Across the Pacific" (DERCAP'09) at the upcoming e-Research Australasia Conference in Sydney Australia, November 9-13, 2009.

For more information, see http://www.eresearch.edu.au/dercap09.

February 2009

Pacific Wave Upgrades bandwidth capacity between sites

The Pacific Wave peering exchange recently increased the bandwidth capacity of its backbone segments from 10Gbps to 20Gbps. The upgraded segments include Los Angeles to Sunnyvale, Sunnyvale to Seattle, and Sunnyvale to Palo Alto. The new configuration allows Pacific Wave to support more peering traffic, increase availability of the service, and provide additional options for network-intensive research projects and events such as SuperComputing.

The capacity upgrade was done using Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP 802.3ad). LACP is included in the IEEE specification as a method to control the bundling of several physical ports together to form a single logical channel. In addition to providing more capacity, LACP also offers the benefit of increased WAN availability. If a link within the bundle fails, traffic is not disrupted across the remaining links (although the available capacity is reduced). The Pacific Wave backbone is utilizing this high availability feature to provide additional WAN redundancy between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale by utilizing 10GE circuits across diverse optical topologies.

January 2009

International Year of Astronomy Kick-off Event

In January 2009, as part of the opening ceremonies for the International Year of Astronomy, 17 telescopes in Australia, Asia, Europe, North American and South America conducted a nearly continuous 32-hour observation of three quasars which are some of the most distant objects known in the Universe. Using an astronomical technique called electronic, real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry or e-VLBI, the participating telescopes observed the same region of sky simultaneously and allowed astronomers to generate images of these cosmic radio sources with up to one hundred times better resolution that images from the best optical telescopes. The data from each telescope was combined and processed in such a way that it simulated a telescope as large as the Earth. The ability to send data electronically and to process it in real-time has the additional advantage of providing data to astronomers within hours of conducting the observations, rather than weeks later via the traditional method of recording data onto disks and shipping it to a central location for processing.

The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) coordinated these observations. The data from each telescope was streamed through high-speed networks to a central processor at JIVE in the Netherlands.

The sister telescopes of The DISH, located at Narrabri and Coonabarabran are two of the radio telescopes involved. CSIRO astronomers Dr Chris Phillips and Dr Tasso Tzioumis controled these radio telescopes remotely from Sydney. The University of Tasmania's 26 metre telescope near Hobart was the other Australian radio telescope taking part. The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNET) provided the internet services for transmitting the data to Europe for real-time processing and used one of the SX-Transport links on their Translight/Pacific Wave connection to then get to CANARIE and then onto JIVE. In preparation for the event, several networking issues needed to be resolved including firewalling a server in CSIRO, installing an "Ethernet break" on CANARIE and fixing dropped packets on a switch at the ATCA.

CSIRO astronomer Dr Chris Phillips notes; "This demonstration is an unprecedented and extraordinary feat of coordination, involving 17 telescopes and 28 data networks around the world."

For more on this extraordinary event, please see the following links:

November 2008

Supercomputing 2008 and Pacific Wave

Pacific Wave is supporting Supercomputing 2008 (SC08) participants by providing a 10 gigabit wave to the showfloor in Austin, TX November 15-21, 2008. Pacific Wave has also added an additional 10 gigabit wave between Seattle and Los Angeles to support conference activities.

The Pacific Wave speedometer for SC08 is located in San Diego Supercomputer's booth number 568 and there will be presentations there and in the USC booth 1651 talking about Pacific Wave activities.

The following Pacific Wave participants are scheduled to use the new capacity for demonstrations and bandwidth challenges at SC08:

  • Calech's demonstration will involve real-time particle event analysis requiring optimized transfers of multi-Terabyte datasets of real data from the CMS and ATLAS detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider
  • KISTI will be participating in two demonstrations: Visualcasting and OptIPlanet/OptIPortal
  • University of Tokyo will be demonstrating parallel TCP Streams with Stream Harmonization and Single TCP stream to challenge 10GBASE-LANPHY maximum
  • National Center of Data Mining will demonstrate applications in astronomy, cyberdefense, and bioinformatics
  • GEMNET will demonstrate HDTV TDW by i-Visto with precise latency measurement traffic *AARNet and EVL will be demonstrating Global Visualcasting

Look for them on the showroom floor! For more about SC08, please view the conference website

To view previous "What's New" features click here.

September 2008

8th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop

Pacific Northwest Gigapop and the University of Washington hosted the 8th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop in Seattle, Washington October 1-2, 2008 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center.

For more information on this event see the Press Release or the GLIF website. For information on Pacific Wave Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) capabilities see the Pacific Wave Technology or Architecture pages.

June 2008

Astronomy without Borders

Working from China, Astronomers from CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility, China's Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have remotely controlled the 25-m Seshan radio telescope near Shanghai, the 34-m telescope in Kashima, Japan, and the CSIRO radio telescopes near Parkes, Coonabarabran and Narrabri in New South Wales and streamed their data to CSIRO’s Parkes Observatory in New South Wales for processing in real time. Each telescope required 512 megabits per second of bandwidth. Data links were provided by AARNet (Australia’s National Research and Education Network) and its counterparts CSTNet in China, JGN2plus in Japan, and CENIC, PNWGP and Pacific Wave in the USA.

For more information on this event, see the press release from CSIRO.

April 2008

Internet2 Wave of the Future Award

The CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility received the Internet2 Wave of the Future Award for its recognized leadership in the development and use of the electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI) technique. E-VLBI is considered one of the most powerful methods for high-resolution imaging of distant radio sources, such as pulsars, quasars and radio galaxies. The technique links geographically dispersed telescopes using advanced optical networks for near real time analysis of telescope data. CSIRO uses Pacific Wave supported facilties to connect from Australia to the JIVE correlator in the Netherlands.

November 2007

Supercomputing '07

From November 10-16, 2007 in Reno, Nevada, Pacific Wave once again provided critical network infrastructure supporting some of the world's most advanced, high-bandwidth applications during SuperComputing 2007 (SC07). Pacific Wave deployed a 10Gbps connection from the convention center into its LA-Sunnyvale-Seattle infrastructure. With this connection, many Pacific Wave participants were able to bridge research networks and oceans to bring their demonstrations from around North America and the Pacific Rim to the showfloor in Reno. Some of the groups taking advantage of this connection included National LambdaRail, WIDE, NASA, TransPAC2, GEMNet2, ESNet, CANARIE, KISTI/KREONet, ResearchChannel, Caltech, AARNet, and TWAREN.

One example of the use of high speed networks was the ResearchChannel's n-Way HD Videoconferencing including tours of the Seattle Science Foundation; lectures by UW researchers; performances by bands sponsored by KEXP; and integrated presentations at the GEMNet2 Symposium in Tokyo and the Reno showfloor. Other examples included the University of Tokyo's GRAPE-DR project, a very high-speed simulation system; and NASA's new visualization tools, including analyses of current and future human spaceflight vehicle designs, climate modeling, and aviation safety alternatives.

August 2007

Real-time e-VLBI data correlation

Collaborators in the EXPReS project (Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service) conducted the first successful real-time correlation of e-VLBI data from Chinese and Australian telescopes, from Chinese and European telescopes, and from Australian and European telescopes. The observation was demonstrated before advanced networking experts at the 24th APAN (Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) Meeting in Xi'An, China. The lightpath from Australia to The Netherlands used a Translight Pacific Wave path constructed for this demonstration.

For more information see First e-VLBI data from China-Australia, China-Europe, Australia-Europe

June 2007

CineGrid @ Holland Festival 2007

On June 20, 2007, the first successful demonstration of trans-Atlantic streaming over photonic IP networks of 4K digital motion pictures and 5.1 surround sound was achieved by the international research consortium, CineGrid. This demonstration, part of the CineGrid @ Holland Festival 2007 project, was the latest in a series of ground-breaking CineGrid experiments using very high quality digital media running over very high speed digital networks.

For more information see

  • CineGrid @ Holland Festival

    • October 2006

    CineGrid Special Event at AES

    For the first time ever, 4K resolution digital motion pictures and 24 channel digital audio was transmitted separately in real time via globe-spanning IP networks, from Los Angeles, San Diego and Tokyo. The picture and sound was synchronized and then mixed “live” for an audience of audio experts, cinema professionals and international technology leaders. These demonstrations took place during Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in San Francisco, October 5-8th

    CineGrid, along with a consortium of partners, including:
    • CENIC/ CalREN
    • Industrial Light & Magic, a Lucasfilm Ltd. company
    • Skywalker Sound, A Lucasfilm Ltd. company
    • Keio University Research Institute for Digital Media and Content (DMC)
    • NTT Network Innovation Laboratories
    • Pacific Interface, Inc.
    • San Francisco State University, Institute for Next Generation Internet
    • University of California San Diego
      • California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2)
      • Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA)
    • University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
    used Pacific Wave and CENIC/CalREN facilities for these real-time demonstrations. The following graphs were produced during the demo:

    August 2006

    New Zealand's new R&E network, KAREN (Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network), goes live on Thursday 31 August at 5:45pm (NZ time). The KAREN launch will be presided over by the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark. A live webcast of the launch will be available at http://www.r2.co.nz/20060831. Pacific Wave welcomes KAREN and it's parent organization REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network of New Zealand) to Pacific Wave and the community of global research and education networks.