Experiences Deploying a 10 Gigabit Ethernet Computing Environment to Support Regional Computational Science

With the advent of Grid computing technology and the continued improvements to high-performance network infrastructure, computational science in distributed computing environments has become an essential research platform for scientists that require access to distributed computational resources, scientific data archives, or Grid-enabled scientific instruments. The development of these environments is challenging because the allocation of staff, funding, and resource usage between the collaborating resource providers and users is a difficult problem to address. Our solution is to leverage the recent advances in 10 Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructure and Grid computing technology to deploy a cost effective, distributed computing environment. This paper focuses on the use of these high-performance network products, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet products from Myricom and Force10 Networks, as an integration tool and the potential consequences of deploying this infrastructure in a legacy computing environment.