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NERSC 3 Greenbook

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Network

The Network situation has changed significantly since the last requirements update. Clearly the growth of the global internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) has increased the overall utilization of the internet; the demand is higher than the evolving supply. ESnet has taken significant steps to make the connectivity and required bandwidth available to the ESnet community. ESnet has done a stellar job in this regard. The advent of distributed computing tools such as desktop video conferencing tools, multimedia electronic mail, and experimental control systems demand continued expansion of network bandwidth. The connections to the internet fabric for specific sites will likely need to be enhanced for ER scientific efforts since the global ``free'' internet is heavily burdened by WWW traffic. This will require T3 or better links to each ESnet site and certain other critical facilities. In addition, international lines will need to be upgraded as the research community becomes more global in character.

As the scale of scientific collaborations and the volumes of data increase for the ER scientific programs the importance of the local and wide area network increases. The role of the local area network in coupling the massive data storage systems with the high-performance computational resources has become as important as the inter-processor communication subsystems of the parallel supercomputers. The wide area network (WAN) and the coupling between the HPCAC and the WAN has a critical role in enabling the collaborative science that spans many laboratories and institutions. As the size of datasets have increased it becomes impractical to duplicate this data at several sites and an application running at any site needs effective access to both local and remote data storage systems.

NERSC 3 Greenbook

Next: Software Up: Hardware Previous: Special Computers