High-Capacity Optical Networking and Deeply Integrated Middleware Services for Distributed Petascale Science

The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) of the Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby announces its interest in receiving grant applications for research to address the end-to-end challenges of terabits (Tbits/s) networks and middleware based on the emerging 100 GigE (Gigabits Ethernet) technologies. The emergence of 100 GigE has opened the terabits networking era, making it possible for the aggregate capacity of backbone networks to reach Tbits/s and beyond. Innovative networking technologies will be needed to enable networks to operate efficiently Tbits/s speeds. Existing protocols, host systems stacks, network interface cards, protection and recovery mechanism, data transfer protocols, cyber security systems, network provisioning schemes, etc., may not easily scale to deliver terabits networking performance critical for DOE science mission.