Gigabit Networking --- XUNET and Project BLANCA

Our research group is part of project BLANCA, a gigabit network testbed funded by the Center for National Research Initiatives. The testbed involves research teams from AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, NCSA, SANDIA National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin. The sites are interconnected by 45 megabits/sec links and selected trunks will be upgraded to 622 megabits/sec including the connection from the UNiversity of Illinois to the University of Wisconsin. The gigabit testbeds are being used to show the benefits a national gigabit network would bring to the scientific and engineering community and enable new technology like distributed supercomputing and data visualization. The 1993 annual report details Blanca research.

Our part in the project has three components. We are involved in the design of the switch controller software for the XUNET 600 megabit/sec switches that are used in the network. The controller establishes virtual circuits and monitors and manages the network. We are also designing HIPPI to XUNET interfaces to connect various supercomputers to the network. The interfaces will be fabricated by SANDIA National Laboratories. We are conducting high-performance distributed computing experiments using the BLANCA testbed to explore the benefits of the larger bandwidth. The distributed computing experiments involve remote file access, distributed applications built using message system primitives, and distributed applications built using shared memory communication primitives. Shared memory communications is supported over BLANCA by an implementation of distributed shared virtual memory developed at the University of Illinois.