High End Computer Networking Advances
December 11, 2020
This year’s High End Computer Networking (HECN) Super Computing 2020 (SC20) Wide Area disk-to-disk demonstration was to be performed over a 4x100Gb/s ESNet pathway that continues onto additional wide-area networks. Because ESNet was in the process of upgrading their network they were unable to provide this connection, however plans are to perform these tests in January 2021. The HECN team built another server this year which has several improvements over last year’s demo system: greatly increased I/O bandwidth using the AMD EPYC processor, with each processor having 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4, the PCIe Gen4 2x200G Ethernet NIC (using it as a 2x100G NIC to interconnect into existing infrastructure), and higher performance PCIe Gen4 NVMe drives. The previous server relied on multiple PCIe switches to expand the two X16 PCIe Gen3 paths from each processor to interconnects for the PCIe NICs and NVMe drives.
