Feb 24, 2023

CENIC Infrastructure Supports Optical Demonstrations at OFCnet in San Diego

From March 5-9, 2023, academic, research, and corporate leaders in the optical communications and networking industries will come together at the OFCnet Conference and Exhibition taking place in the San Diego Convention Center to meet and greet, teach and learn, make connections and move the industry forward.

Starting in 2021, CENIC announced that its infrastructure would support optical demonstrations at the conference requiring connectivity beyond the show floor, and that this infrastructure would be left in place until 2027 to support future OFC conferences. This is achieved via a fiber connection from the San Diego Convention Center to the CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN) optical backbone node at San Diego which provides up to 34 Terabits per second of capacity to the OFC exhibition floor.

Among the demonstrations by CENIC members and others in the R&E networking community making use of this link are the following:

• UCSD will demonstrate two workflows using 2x 200G links from UCSD’s San Diego Supercomputing Center to the convention center show floor. A Gigabyte 2U server will join the National Research Platform's Nautilus Hypercluster using the two 200 Gbps links provided by CENIC and Pacific Wave. One link will allow Open Science Grid (OSG) workflows to run on the server on the show floor at the OFC conference, and the second will run network speed tests between UCSD and the OFC conference.
• The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) demonstration will present a high-level technical overview and show examples of data and analysis from the High-Touch system being deployed in ESnet6, the latest version of ESnet’s backbone network.
• NorthWestern University/ICAIR demonstrations will showcase capabilities and technologies supporting 400 Gbps WAN services based on E2E optical channels between the OFC show floor and the Starlight datacenter in Chicago.
• Also of interest to the CENIC community, Verizon and NEC will demonstrate several new functions of telecom-oriented distributed fiber optic sensing

Other demonstrations relating to CENIC’s recent announcements of successful validations of coherent optical pluggables are the following:

• NTT Labs will conduct a live network demonstration of DWDM coherent transmission using an open network OS using data-center switches and QSFP-DD pluggable transceivers.
• A group of Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) members will demonstrate optical network equipment elements from multiple suppliers that seamlessly interoperate at data rates up to 400G. Participants include AT&T, Ciena, Cisco-Acacia, Fujitsu, Infinera, Juniper, Lumentum, NEC, Nokia, NTT, Orange, and Ribbon in collaboration with the researchers at the OpNeAR laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas and Politecnico di Milano.

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