XSEDE Upgrades to 100GBps Backbone

US supercomputing network gets a massive bandwidth bump thanks to Internet2 technology.

The US National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a network of 17 research supercomputing centers across the United States, recently announced a major bandwidth upgrade that could increase throughput to 10 times the previous level. Until now, the XSEDE centers have been connected through a 10GB per second backbone network. The recent upgrade places the network on a super-fast 100GB per second Internet2 optical network.

Internet2 is a consortium of research institutions, government agencies, and companies committed to developing and deploying advanced networking technologies. The Internet2 consortium operates the 100GB per second network that will be accessible to the XSEDE supercomputing centers.

This colossal bandwidth upgrade could eventually revolutionize how the computers in the XSEDE network interact, leading to improved cooperation and data sharing, as well as increased on-demand computing and software-defined network (SDN) services.