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CALIENT S320 OCS Plays Critical Role in "The World's Fastest Network" - SCinet 2018
[November 07, 2018]

CALIENT S320 OCS Plays Critical Role in "The World's Fastest Network" - SCinet 2018


CALIENT Technologies, Inc., the global leader for optical switching technology, today announced its S320 optical circuit switch (OCS) will play a key connectivity role in SCinet, the "world's fastest network." The network will debut at SC18 - the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking and Storage, which is open from Nov. 11-16 in Dallas.

SCinet architects selected the 320-port S320 to create an optical overlay network connecting core routers from Juniper and Cisco with optical transport systems from Juniper, Ciena and Infinera (News - Alert), using 100GbE connections. Any connection from the core routers can be switched to any port on the optical transport systems without re-fibering. With support for up to 400GbE and less than 30ns of latency per port, the use of the S320 adds significant connectivity flexibility without impacting network throughput or latency.

Network test equipment from Spirent, Ixia (News - Alert), Viavi, and Exfo was also connected to the S320 to create a fiber-once test infrastructure, allowing network operators to remotely and dynamically switch a test set to any router or optical transport system port when needed. Network engineers made use of this flexibility to configure and test network connections during set up and it will also be used to assist with troubleshooting equipment and optical links while the network is operational.

"Working with SCinet puts CALIENT front and center with the biggest vendors in the industry in one of the highest-bandwidth data center and wide area networks in the industry," said David Altstaetter, CALIENT Vice President of Product Marketing. "By adopting the S320 for remote network testing and configuration, SCinet is demonstrating a best practice that many service providers and data centers are dvocating."



SCinet: The $52 Million All Volunteer Network

SCinet is built every year for the SC Conference to showcase the latest network technology. Every year, the high-capacity network infrastructure is designed and built by volunteer experts from industry, academia, and government. This year, SCinet staging and installation involves more than 200 volunteers and $52 million in donated hardware, software, and services.


More than one mile of new fiber optic cable has been laid underneath several downtown Dallas landmarks to connect SCinet with carrier points-of-presence that provide wide area network (WAN) services. Network planning begins more than a year in advance of each conference and culminates in a network that, for the duration of the conference, is the fastest and most powerful network in the world.

S320 Details

CALIENT's S320 OCS is a reliable and cost-effective all-optical switch that leverages the company's optical 3D Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (3D MEMS) switching core for data switching that is transparent to data speed, and is protocol agnostic, thus it offers very high bandwidth and configuration flexibility as networks grow in speed from 10Gbps to 40Gbps, 100Gbps, and beyond. The OCS delivers latency of less than 30ns and has a very low power draw of 45 Watts. The switch is used in many data centers and service provider networks needing high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity.

About CALIENT Technologies

CALIENT Technologies is the global leader in pure photonic Optical Circuit Switching with systems that enable dynamic optical layer optimization in next generation data centers and software defined networks. CALIENT's 3D MEMS switches allow data center operators to dramatically improve utilization rates of expensive compute resources which typically account for 75% to 90% of investment. Data center operators and metro service providers also deploy CALIENT switches at the edges of their networks to facilitate multi-layer network optimization for maximum efficiency and flexibility. In this application, the optical circuit switches support network-wide implementation of high-bandwidth SD-WAN regardless of the vendor or vintage of the optical transport system. The company designs and manufactures its systems using the state of art MEMS fabrication equipment at its corporate headquarters in Santa Barbara, California.

For more information, visit CALIENT at http://www.calient.net, on Twitter and LinkedIn, or contact us at: [email protected].

About SC Conference

SC, sponsored by IEEE (News - Alert) Computer Society and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, a world class exhibit area, demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on learning. For more information on SC18, please visit: https://sc18.supercomputing.org


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