After the Storm: GNA-G and SCinet at SC25

At SC25 in November, the GNA-G Data Intensive Sciences Working Group brought ambition and big ideas to the exhibit floor. Now, weeks later, the results are in: record-breaking transfers, real-time science demonstrations, and cross-continental deployments show that we are now moving toward operational next-generation research infrastructure.

The SC25 exhibit hall was more than a display space. It became a working node in a global research fabric coordinated through SCinet, with over 14 dedicated 400 Gbps links stitching sites in Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Chicago, Geneva, São Paulo, and Saudi Arabia, including hybrid links capable of supporting both classical and quantum channels.

Data caches at Caltech and UCSD served production CMS and ATLAS workloads. Intercontinental traffic was routed through high-performance DTNs deployed on the show floor, using 400G ConnectX-7 NICs and Zededa edge orchestration nodes. A new generation of programmable infrastructure (backed by Arista, Ciena, Cisco, Dell, and Nokia) was brought online and stressed under real workloads.

ABOVE IMAGE

Joe Mambretti (left), a long-time leader in advanced networking and a key contributor to the StarLight exchange and many GNA-G activities, presented at the Caltech Booth, showing how SC25 demonstrations leveraged worldwide 100G–400G circuits for intercontinental data flows. Harvey Newman (right), from Caltech, presented on a next-generation network-integrated system that addresses the challenges of data-intensive science, focusing on intelligent operations, new methods of network operation, and capacity management to benefit both research and production teams.

The Caltech team stands in front of a real-time InMon graph, capturing a high-throughput moment during the “data tsunami” test. This is a coordinated, multi-terabit-per-second data flow across SCinet. These bursts were used to simulate extreme data movement scenarios, relevant to next-generation scientific instruments and workloads.

With the help of teams at Caltech, Starlight, AmLight, CERN, KAUST, RNP (Brazil), and many others, SC25 achieved a new level of sustained high-throughput transfers. Internal InMon telemetry captured several 400 Gbps+ data bursts during NRE teams’ testing of QoS policies, edge acceleration, and end-to-end circuit provisioning. A few key milestones:

• 400 Gbps+ transfers achieved between SC25 and multiple international endpoints.
  
• Dual-NIC 400G DTNs tuned and brought into production with ConnectX-7 hardware.
  
• Live demonstrations of PolKA source-based routing, SENSE-controlled overlays, and machine learning-assisted flow optimization.
  
• Cache-coordinated workloads executed on Open Science Grid nodes and ESnet/Internet2 infrastructure.

These achievements were made possible through months of collaborative build-out and the operational maturity of tools such as perfSONAR, SENSE, and others.

What Comes Next

The conference may be over, but the infrastructure is staying online. GNA-G participants are:

• Continuing to deploy 400G–800G links and testing pluggable optics.
  
• Planning additional SENSE rollouts for high-energy physics workloads.
  
• Scaling up federation for smart devices (including edge inference on smartNICs and AI accelerators).
  
• Deepening partnerships with commercial vendors to harden solutions for science use.

From cosmic rays to climate modeling, from machine learning to high-energy physics, these networks are becoming the enablers of tomorrow’s discoveries.

Learn More

We were delighted to share our project insights throughout the year with the SC25 community.  If you would like to read more about GNA-G and how SCinet played a key role in our success, check out:

• Sparking Innovation: How Global Research Networks Enable Discovery
• SCinet at Scale: Building the Network Infrastructure for Discovery