Turin Networks announced today that the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is deploying its Ethernet-over-SONET platform as part of a major upgrade of their local infrastructure and wide area connectivity. Turin's flagship products connect the PSC's Pittsburgh GigaPoP with the terascale computing system (TCS) housed at the Westinghouse Electric Company, over leased dark fiber.
The newly installed network infrastructure, which began carrying production traffic in early November, is critical in the support of high-bandwidth applications for the TCS. One such project already benefiting from the new infrastructure is the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. The Tele-Immersion project involving researchers at PSC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and University of Pennsylvania, enables real-time, 3D-image collaboration between researchers at geographically dispersed locations. PSC expects that the new infrastructure in combination with the six Teraflop processing power of the Terascale computing system will provide the foundation for many innovative applications in the future.
"After studying several options for lighting the dark fiber, we concluded that Turin's Traverse platform offered the flexibility and scalability we required, at an attractive price," said Ken Goodwin, production network coordinator, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. "It easily met our current bandwidth needs and gives us the ability to add switching capacity, and upgrade to OC-192, as needed in the future."
Turin's platform is an Ethernet over SONET/SDH solution, integrating the functions of a next-generation SONET add-drop multiplexer and digital crossconnect system with an Ethernet aggregation switch in a single compact shelf. Leveraging this functionality, as well as advanced capabilities such as standards-based virtual concatenation, PSC is able to efficiently support multiple wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet connections over their leased fiber. Advanced VLAN and rate-limiting features will also allow them to support per-port or per traffic-class bandwidth service level agreements in the future.
"We're excited to be providing the technology infrastructure academic researchers require for innovative, high-performance applications like the Tele-Immersion project," said Dr. Hui Zhang, chief technology officer, Turin Networks. "Research and education customers like the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are pioneering a new era in communications."
Founded in October of 1999, Turin Networks is headquartered in Petaluma, the center of California's "Telecom Valley," with additional offices in Boston and London.