A major optical network upgrade is improving connections between Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and the Large Hardron Collider at CERN.

As the world's scientists await the Large Hadron Collider restart in November 2009, capacity is being increased on network linking Russia's scientists to the project.

Nortel and jet Infosystems are installing and deploying the upgrade.

The upgraded optical backbone connects scientists in Russia to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid enabling them to take part in this major international scientific project and receive extremely large volumes of data direct from the collider after its restart.

A global collaboration of more than 170 computing centres in 34 countries, the WLCG builds and maintains the data storage and analysis infrastructure for the international high energy physics community that will use the Large Hadron Collider located at CERN in Switzerland.

The Russian segment of the WLCG includes institutes affiliated with the Russian Data Intensive Grid (RDIG) community.

In Russia, data communication between RDIG sites is performed via the Russian Backbone network(1) operated by the Russian Institute for Public Networks.

The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research is located in Dubna 200 kilometers northwest of Moscow and its Laboratory of Information Technologies (LIT) is one of the heaviest loaded data centers in WLCG.

Data exchange rate and data flow intensity between the data source and processing facility in Dubna and the WLCG network node in Moscow requires massive amounts of bandwidth.



"We launched our new high-speed optical link between Moscow and Dubna with an initial capacity of 20G in May 2009. After considering many proposals from different vendors we chose Nortel for this project because they offered a cost-effective scalable solution, which addresses all our needs at the moment and provided a clear migration path to the future. Now, after three months of successful live trials with real traffic from the LHC, we can state objectively, based on actual data, that our site is one of the best sites on the worldwide grid infrastructure (WLCG)," said Vladimir Korenkov, deputy for JINR LIT CIO.

JINR Dubna was connected to the Russian segment of WLCG with an optical SDH link.

In preparation for the restart of The Large Hadron Collider project, Nortel and partner Jet Infosystems proposed repurposing JINR Dubna spare optical fibers and installing a 10G DWDM system which enabled optical link capacity to be increased. The project involved upgrading the 200 km long optical link with Nortel DWDM technology using Common Photonic Layer (CPL) amplifiers to make the link "40G ready", adding 10G capacity now that can be increased readily to 40G.

"The Large Hadron Collider is a great example of international collaboration and we are very pleased to be supporting it and the international community of scientists via this project in Russia," said Sergey Fishkin, country manager, Russia & CIS, Nortel. "Nortel has worked with other major international scientific networks such as CANARIE, GLORIAD and SURFnet, allowing us to bring this experience to this international project which benefits Russia's research of the Universe."


Symbolic: The Joint Institute for Nuclear Reserach

"Our company has extensive experience in DWDM-based projects aimed at carriers," said Ilya Trifalenkov, CEO Advisor, Jet Infosystems. "However, this is our first project implemented in collaboration with Nortel for fundamental scientific networks, and our ability to migrate our expertise from one business area to another has been one of the most rewarding challenges on this project. We have found that we could use our competency and experience working with carriers to benefit this project and we have learned a lot along the way about working with scientific research institutions."

Equipment used in the upgrade includes Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 and Nortel Common Photonic Layer (CPL), which upgraded the former SDH link into DWDM-based core backbone network with an IP packet backbone over it. This combination of DWDM and IP is consistent with the technologies used by many global scientific networking communities such as GLIF(1), and GEANT(1) and in research networks - such as SURFNET(1).

Related Event: DatacenterDynamics MOSCOW
Related News Moscow colo supplier to offer virtualisation and partitioning
Related News: High end server market holds up in Russia and Central Europe

Keywords: CERN, Moscow, network, optical, Large hadron collider, nuclear, institute, connectivity, research,