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Next-Generation Multi-100 Gbps Switching Exchange Enhances Support for “Petascale Science”

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HANOVER, Md. and Chicago, Ill. — 11/10/2014

As part of a continuing effort to enable large-scale, data-intensive petascale science applications worldwide, Ciena® (NYSE:CIEN) and the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN) have upgraded StarWave, a Chicago-based research and education (R&E) communication services exchange facility with Ciena’s 8700 Packetwave Platform. This upgrade will facilitate transfers for multiple sciences, such as data flows used by high energy physicists investigating particle collisions, and medical researchers sharing massive genomic data files and high-resolution images of protein strands used for cancer research.

Key Facts:

  • The StarWave multi-100 Gbps exchange, located at the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility Consortium, supports large-capacity, long duration, and low latency individual data flow transfers. To boost network connectivity and help researchers transfer even greater amounts of scientific data and applications, MREN is deploying Ciena’s new 8700 platform for 100GbE bandwidth interconnection.
  • Later this month at the Supercomputing (SC14) conference in New Orleans, multiple national and international 100 Gbps demonstrations will leverage this network to showcase a variety of advanced R&E demonstrations.
  • This network enhancement strengthens Ciena’s long-standing collaboration efforts with MREN, a seven state regional network, StarLight, and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University (iCAIR). The collaborators’ mission is to develop new networking techniques, technologies, and services to support petascale science and computing-intensive research that crosses a number of disciplines including high-energy physics, computational genomics and brain simulations.
  • Ciena and these collaborators are also using SDN technologies to explore new virtualized network models to increase performance and flexibility for researchers. The work includes the National Science Foundation’s Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) initiative that supports "at scale" research in networking, distributed systems, security, and novel applications. Through its participation in this activity, Ciena is developing additional capabilities on the 8700 to allow these researchers to integrate SDN technologies with 100 Gbps services.

Executive Comments:

  • “Ciena’s technology plays a pivotal role in supporting big data, high-performance computing and R&E efforts, improving the way researchers interact and conduct complex, data-intensive scientific discovery. Our 8700 platform enables the needed collaboration in the R&E community by offering massive scalability to carry huge science data flows in a platform that is easy to set up, deploy, and manage.” — Rod Wilson, Senior Director of External Research, Ciena
  • “Large-scale data intensive science has a history of driving next-generation high-performance networking because science researchers encounter major communication technology challenges years before other communities.” — Joe Mambretti, Director, Metropolitan Research & Education Network

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