KREONET

Jan. 2, 2020 — The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) has announced the building of the Science Super Highway, a next-generation research platform that enables the extremely large data transfer for scientific data generated at large-scale experimental facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Square Kilometer Array (SKA), Korean e-VLBI project, and Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR). The Science Super Highway is being built over KREONET (Korea Research Environment Open NETwork), based on the ScienceDMZ model and global collaboration with major international partners, and is the result of $10 million invested over 3 years by the Korean government for the development of infrastructure to support big data. KISTI has taken part as an international partner in the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) project, funded by the National Science Foundation (U.S. NSF), by demonstrating that geographical distance is no longer a barrier to the transfer of big data.

KISTI has been operating KREONET since 1988. KREONET consists of 17 geographically distributed regional points of presence (PoPs) and four international PoPs, enabling high degrees of reachability and availability to the Science Super Highway for key research communities in Korea. The Science Super Highway enables end-to-end high-performance networking based on both a 100Gbps core backbone and the ScienceDMZ model. ScienceDMZ is an essential technology for constructing the Science Super Highway as it allows science big data to be delivered with a maximum throughput recording rate of more than 90% of the entire bandwidth of the end-to-end network. In this case, the science traffic is separated from the general traffic, including business traffic, and bypasses security devices such as IDS, IPS, Web-based firewalls that normally degrade transfer performance. To secure the ScienceDMZ, a lightweight security strategy based on network flow control, such as a network Access Control List (ACL), is tailored to the strict requirements of Korea’s NIS (National Intelligence Service) security review. KREONET provides a practical end-to-end dedicated network with lightpath provisioning and a perfSONAR, which is the performance measurement server used for monitoring regularly the end-to-end network, to enable a dedicated server called a Data Transfer Node (DTN) to transfer large amounts of scientific data using an NVMe interface.

Based on ScienceDMZ, KISTI has designed and deployed multiple 100G DTNs using KISTI-5 Nurion supercomputers employing the Lustre file system to for improved data transfer performance with high scalability. Furthermore, KISTI has been collaborating with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (U.S. NERSC) and Energy Sciences Network (U.S. ESNET) to connect KISTI-5 Nurion DTNs to NERSC Cori DTNs by fully utilizing an international 100Gbps connection.

The science engagement activity between network engineers and scientists has allowed the transfer of big data with maximum throughput to be realized. In particular, the Korean VLBI Network (KVN) of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) can transmit astronomical big data from three radio telescopes in Ulsan, Seoul, and Jeju to the correlation center in Daejeon via the 100Gbps Science Super Highway Network. This transmission performance enables us to study the spectral and temporal characteristics of transient sources such as bursting star-forming regions, intra-day variable compact radio sources, and gamma-ray flaring AGNs. As an especially significant participant of EHT project, the KVN has contributed the world-first observation of the M87 black hole’s shadow on April 2019, transferring huge amounts of observation data using the KISTI Science Super Highway. Through these efforts, the KVN can lead the latest East-Asian VLBI network (EAVN), which is built to connect most radio telescopes on the global-scale Science Super Highway. KISTI launched the R&E Together project in October of 2019, sponsored by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, to integrate seven national research institutions in the Daeduck Science Complex and the AI GPU platform into the Science Super Highway. Furthermore, to build a more secure Science Super Highway, KISTI has begun research on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology for integration into KREONET.

Source: Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)

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