“NSFNET went online in 1986 and connected the supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second” (!)
“In a short time, the network became congested and, by 1988, its links were upgraded to 1.5 megabits per second.” (!!)
“NSFNET forced the Internet community to iron out technical issues arising from the rapidly increasing number of computers and address many practical details of operations, management and conformance. Throughout its existence, NSFNET carried, at no cost to institutions, any U.S. research and education traffic that could reach it.”
Science needs networking
The Department of Energy supports National Labs that have access to supercomputing facilities
Physics simulations, other big computing goals like climate modeling
But those sites are often idle unless people elsewhere can use them
Networking!
Networking for supercomputers
Huge data sets transmitted across the network to & from supercomputing centers
Transfer, transfer, transfer
How to coordinate multiple networks?
Solution: Grid networking
“Leveraging multiple computers, often geographically distributed but connected by networks, to work together to accomplish joint tasks”
Like cloud computing but before the cloud
Development efforts led mostly at the national labs
“As of mid 2016, Globus has been used to move more than 150 PB of data in 25 billion files, is regularly used by more than 2,300 unique people per month, and supports more than 40,000 endpoints”
Which of these numbers are large and which are small?