Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) is a networking technology which offers the potential to provide significant cost savings to Sandia National Laboratories in the area of network operations. However, a large scale GPON deployment requires a significant investment in equipment and infrastructure. Before a large scale GPON system was acquired and built, a small GPON system manufactured by Motorola was acquired and tested. The testing performed was to determine the suitability of GPON for use at SNL. This report documents that testing. This report presents test results of GPON system consisting of Motorola and Juniper equipment. The GPON system was tested in areas of data throughput, video conferencing, VOIP, security, and operations and management. The GPON system performed well in almost all areas. GPON will not meet the needs of the low percentage of users requiring a true 1-10 Gbps network connection. GPON will also most likely not meet the need of some servers requiring dedicated throughput of 1-10 Gbps. Because of that, there will be some legacy network connections that must remain. If these legacy network connections can not be reduced to a bare minimum and possibly consolidated to a few locations, any cost savings gained by switching to GPON will be negated by maintaining two networks. A contract has been recently awarded for new GPON equipment with larger buffers. This equipment should improve performance and further reduce the need for legacy network connections. Because GPON has fewer components than a typical hierarchical network, it should be easier to manage. For the system tested, the management was performed by using the AXSVison client. Access to the client must be tightly controlled, because if client/server communications are compromised, security will be an issue. As with any network, the reliability of individual components will determine overall system reliability. There were no failures with the routers, OLT, or Sun Workstation Management platform. There were however four ONTs that failed. Because of the small sample size of 64, and the fact that some of the ONTs were used units, no conclusions can be made. However, ONT reliability is an area of concern. Access to the fiber plant that GPON requires must be tightly controlled and all changes documented. The undocumented changes that were performed in the GPON test lab demonstrated the need for tight control and documentation. In summary, GPON should be able to meet the needs of most network users at Sandia National Laboratories. Because it supports voice, video, and data, it positions Sandia National Laboratories to deploy these services to the desktop. For the majority of corporate network users at Sandia National Laboratories GPON should be a suitable replacement for the legacy network.
This document highlights the Discom's Distance computing and communication team activities at the 2000 Supercomputing conference in Dallas Texas. This conference is sponsored by the IEEE and ACM. Sandia's participation in the conference has now spanned a decade, for the last five years Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab have come together at the conference under the DOE's ASCI, Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiatives, Program rubric to demonstrate ASCI's emerging capabilities in computational science and our combined expertise in high performance computer science and communication networking developments within the program. At SC 2000, DISCOM demonstrated an infrastructure. DISCOM2 uses this forum to demonstrate and focus communication and pre-standard implementation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the first gigabyte per second data IP network transfer application, and VPN technology that enabled a remote Distributed Resource Management tools demonstration. Additionally a national OC48 POS network was constructed to support applications running between the show floor and home facilities. This network created the opportunity to test PSE's Parallel File Transfer Protocol (PFTP) across a network that had similar speed and distances as the then proposed DISCOM WAN. The SCINET SC2000 showcased wireless networking and the networking team had the opportunity to explore this emerging technology while on the booth. This paper documents those accomplishments, discusses the details of their convention exhibit floor. We also supported the production networking needs of the implementation, and describes how these demonstrations supports DISCOM overall strategies in high performance computing networking.
This document highlights the Discom{sup 2}'s Distance computing and communication team activities at the 1999 Supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon. This conference is sponsored by the IEEE and ACM. Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National laboratories have participated in this conference for eleven years. For the last four years the three laboratories have come together at the conference under the DOE's ASCI, Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiatives rubric. Communication support for the ASCI exhibit is provided by the ASCI DISCOM{sup 2} project. The DISCOM{sup 2} communication team uses this forum to demonstrate and focus communication and networking developments within the community. At SC 99, DISCOM built a prototype of the next generation ASCI network demonstrated remote clustering techniques, demonstrated the capabilities of the emerging Terabit Routers products, demonstrated the latest technologies for delivering visualization data to the scientific users, and demonstrated the latest in encryption methods including IP VPN technologies and ATM encryption research. The authors also coordinated the other production networking activities within the booth and between their demonstration partners on the exhibit floor. This paper documents those accomplishments, discusses the details of their implementation, and describes how these demonstrations support Sandia's overall strategies in ASCI networking.