Advanced Networking
The Advanced Networking Group at PSC conducts research on network performance and analysis in support of high performance computing applications. This group also develops software to support heterogeneous distributed supercomputing applications and to implement high-speed interfaces to archival and mass storage systems. Work done by this group includes TCP implementations, TCP tuning, and software to monitor and improve network performance.
Research projects
3ROX — The Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX) is a regional network aggregation point, also called a GigaPoP, providing high-speed commodity and research network access to sites in western and central Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
HPN-SSH — HPN-SSH is a series of modifications to OpenSSH, the predominant implementation of the ssh protocol. It was originally developed to address performance issues when using ssh on high-speed, long distance networks (also known as Long Fat Networks: LFNs). By taking advantage of automatically optimized receive buffers, HPN-SSH could improve performance dramatically on these paths. Later advances include: disabling encryption after authentication to transport non-sensitive bulk data; modifying the AES-CTR cipher to use multiple CPU cores; more detailed connection logging; and peak throughput values in the scp progress bar.
KINBER and PennREN — The Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research serves as coordinator for the construction and management of a Pennsylvania-wide fiber optic network, PennREN (Pennsylvania Research and Education Network). PennREN will be accessible to educational, research, health care, and economic development partners seeking to aggregate services for their members and subscribers at affordable cost.
Networking tools, software, and information
TestRig 2.0 — A bootable Linux ISO used to automatically and conveniently generate network performance data for analysis by PSC engineers.
High Performance Enabled SSH/SCP – HPN-SSH — Maximize the performance of secure copying and connections between hosts on a high performance network.
Enabling high performance Data Transfers
TCP performance tuning
Poll-Switch — SNMP poll a layer-2 device — Retrieving host and port information from a layer-2 switch running an SNMP agent.
IP-Utils — Enable data communication via a simple API for various IP-based networking protocols.
Networking research papers
Previous work
Web10G — Web10G promises innovations in performance, stability, optimization, and network diagnostics to anyone who wants to fully exploit modern high-bandwidth connections. It provides users with real-time statistics about their network connections, and allows them to fine-tune some characteristics of the connection to improve performance.
DANCES — The DANCES project (Developing Applications with Networking Capabilities via End-to-End SDN) developed tools to allow the scheduling of network resources similar to the way compute resources are scheduled, with the aim of reducing data transfer bottlenecks, a serious hindrance to scientific research.
NPAD/pathdiag — Automatic diagnostic server for troubleshooting end-systems and last-mile network problems.
Mac-Scan — Scan hosts on a VLAN or network for vulnerabilities.
SAMI (NIMI) — Creating a Secure and Accountable Measurement Infrastructure.
Web 100 — Created to address automatic TCP buffer tuning.