RENCIÕs BEN
(Breakable Experimental Network)
Chris Heermann
ckh@renci.org

Renaissance Computing Institute
RENCI vision
a multidisciplinary institute
academe, commerce and society
broad in scope and participation
Objectives
enrich and empower human potential
faculty, staff, students, collaborators
create multidisciplinary partnerships
science, engineering and computing
commerce, humanities and the arts
develop and deploy leading infrastructure
driven by collaborative opportunities
enable and sustain economic development
Multidisciplinary team model
scientists, creative artists, and computing researchers
exploring new approaches to old and new problems

RENCI Profile
Funding and staff
~$25M annual budget
$11M in state funding
~100 staff across multiple sites
Locations
Europa anchor site
Engagement sites
NCSU, Duke and UNC-CH
ECU, UNCA, UNCC
Major statewide thrusts
Disaster response
Health care
Collaborative projects
Arts, science, engineering

Network research at RENCI
New group, actively expanding
Independent research with external funding
NSF FIND
SILO project in collaboration with NCSU
DARPA CORONET
Supporting role to HPC and Visualization research at RENCI
Actively engaging with a large pool of research talent at Triangle Universities
BEN initiative

BEN (Breakable Experimental Network)
BEN is an experimental fiber facility
Will support experimentation at metro scale
Distributed applications researchers
Networking researchers
Not a production network
Enabling disruptive technologies
Shared by the researchers at the three Triangle Universities
Coarse-grained time sharing is the primary mode for usage
Assumes some experiments must be granted exclusive access to the infrastructure

Slide 6
Slide 7
Slide 8
Slide 9
Slide 10
BEN Network Node
Space and power
2-3 7Õ racks at each location
PDUs - Remote Power Management
Programmable, Experimental Layer 1/2/3
Configurable Layer 1/2/3
Configurable Optical Facility

Slide 12
BEN Redux
Reconfigurable optical plane
Researcher equipment access at all layers
Down to raw fiber
Install experimental equipment
Equipment with exposible APIs
GMPLS support
Connectivity with substantial non-production resources
Connectivity to National R&E networks
NLR 10GigE FrameNet
Internet2 and NLR using NCREN
Enabling research all the way to Type 6 as identified in GDD-06-26
Access to raw fiber bandwidth. E.g. new transmission, modulation, coding and formats

BEN governance and usage
BEN is a shared resource for advancing the state of experimental science in the Triangle
BEN is controlled by the researchers running experiments on it
Resource allocation and management is done entirely by the researchers themselves

Planned Near-term Research on BEN
Enabling remote HD visualization
Multi-screen HD viswalls with data striped across multiple wavelengths
4K video distribution
Transporting 4xHD signal across the network
Cross-layer interactions
Interactions between the optical plane and the packet forwarding plane
RENCI + NCSU + Keren Bergman (Columbia)
GENI-alization of resources
Extension of ORCA/COD project from Duke [Jeff Chase]
RENCI + Duke

Longer-term research on BEN
Hybrid multicast
Optical + electronic
Metro cluster interconnects
Distributed datacenter
Introduction of wireless extensions
Format-agnostic optical transport
Just-in-time signaling

Thank you