The Bandwidth for Leadership in Advancing Science and Technology (BLAST) project award to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) is designed to significantly improving a wide range of science data flows for local, state of Tennessee, and national science and engineering research communities by connecting the UTK campus to the 100 gigabit per second national network and extending this connection to the leadership class high-performance computing (HPC) facilities at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS). By dramatically improving the bandwidth available for all types of campus bridging, data transfer services to/from HPC resources, data archives, and wide-area network file systems, BLAST directly addresses bottlenecks to scientific discovery in leading data and compute intensive research activities.
The network infrastructure upgrade provided by BLAST improves science and engineering research productivity and facilitates scientific discovery by enabling researchers to exploit high performance networking bandwidth for science data flows to support knowledge exchange and scientific discovery. Some examples uses of this upgraded network infrastructure include improved gridFTP data transfers, high-performance access to archives and WAN file systems, and data transfers with Globus Online. The BLAST project also includes end-to-end network performance tuning collaborations between UTK, NICS and four leading data and compute intensive research projects in earthquake simulation, numerical weather prediction, Earth climate research on intra-seasonal and inter-decadal time scales, and simulations for the study of climate effects on public health, water resources and energy. The information obtained and lessons learned will be disseminated to the broader community to share this important knowledge.
project was led and supported by The University of Tennessee (UT) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) and UT’s Office of Information Technology. BLAST was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure – Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) program award number 1246211 and has provided a network bandwidth increase to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) which represents a ten times performance increase over previous network bandwidth capabilities and positions UT as an early university adopter of 100Gb technology in the Southeast region. The BLAST project was comprised of four main components: the UT network equipment upgrade, provisioning of 100 Gbps capable long distance optical network circuits, upgrade of the UT Internet service bandwidth to 100 Gbps from Southern Crossroads (SoX) connecting in Atlanta, and performance evaluation and tuning in cooperation with the BLAST collaborators. The network bandwidth upgrade components were completed by the end of May 2014 and the team performed pre- and post-upgrade network performance testing in cooperation with BLAST collaborators at UT, Emory University, University of Oklahoma (OU), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech), Purdue University and SoX. Along with the equipment and bandwidth upgrade, staff and collaborators participating in BLAST gained valuable experience and learned a significant amount about perfSONAR, linux, network, and gridftp configuration and tuning all with the goal of greater than one gigabit per second high performance data transfers with collaborators and the application of this knowledge to future network data transfers for UT and collaborator researchers. Example results include: iperf performance improvements from UT to OU of 26% (5.53 Gbps to 6.98 Gbps); iperf measured performance improvements, limited by 40Gb perfSONAR devices, between Oak Ridge and the Knoxville campus of 31% (8.69 to 11.4 Gbps) for single stream and a measured iperf performance of 19.8 Gpbs for parallel stream; iperf measured performance, limited by 40G and 4x10G perfSONAR devices, from UT to SoX in Atlanta of 37.41 Gbps; GridFTP disk-to-disk file transfer performance improvements from UT to NCAR of 45% (1.413 Gbps to 2.049 Gbps); GridFTP disk-to-disk file transfer performance improvements from UT to OU of 1875% (104 Mbps to 1.951 Gbps); and measured GridFTP disk-to-disk file transfer performance between JICS at Oak Ridge and the UT Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Knoxville of 3.200 Gbps. With the increase in bandwidth and the knowledge gained by the implementation of the BLAST project, the University of Tennessee has a strong foundation for implementing individual file transfer performance of one gigabit per second and higher and aggregate performance of tens of gigabits per second for UT researchers and their collaborators where last mile problems have been addressed by tuning and/or infrastructure investment.
