Significant Increases in Network Traffic Across NREN in 2006

January 2007 - NREN, which transports the majority of NASA's high-end computing data traffic, has experienced a tremendous growth in network traffic over the past year-at a rate significantly higher than Moore's Law. During the heaviest month, October 2006, the network saw over 37 terabytes of data being transferred in and out of the Columbia supercomputing environment, with about 50% of the data coming to/from NASA Goddard. On average, Goddard, which represents NASA's Science Mission Directorate, accounted for between 15 and 50% of the traffic flow coming across NREN in any given month last year. Other heavy contributors included NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, NASA Langley, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The increased traffic growth coincides with an increase in Columbia usage. Furthermore, coupled with the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility's storage system, file system, and network upgrades, there has been an aggressive campaign to work with Columbia users to increase their data transfer rates to help meet their modeling and simulation requirements.

Routing Protocol to Enhance Lunar/Planetary Surface Communications

March 2006 - Members of the NREN team have implemented Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), which enables any node in a local wireless network to relay data on behalf of any other node. This technology increases both the robustness of surface communications and the amount of area that can be covered by a surface wireless network, which will be extremely useful in future surface exploration missions involving teams of humans and robots. Two DSR-enabled team members unable to communicate directly with each other due to distance or obstructions in the communication path (hills or large rocks, for example) will still be able to communicate with minimal degradation of communication latency, as long as one or more intermediate member can relay data between them.

BBFTP Increases Data Rates Dramatically

September 2006 - NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN) engineers worked with the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Virginia, supporting the GEOS-5 Atmospheric Assimilation System, to more effectively transfer data between the Columbia supercomputer located at NASA Ames Research Center in California and the GSFC NASA Center for Computational Science (NCCS). By using a transfer application known as BBFTP, data transfer rates as high as 52 megabytes per second (MB/s) or 415 megabits per second (Mb/s) were achieved on NREN at various times during the week. These transfers, in addition to other Columbia data transfer activities, resulted in net transfers of well over 4 terabytes during the week of September 17, 2006. Prior to this effort, the GMAO was achieving file transfers of 71 (Mb/s) with BBFTP.