Arista helps National Centre for Nuclear Research build a low latency and high performance network infrastructure to support supercomputing excellence
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- Poland
Product
- Arista 7050 Series Switches
- Arista EOS®
- Coraid EtherDrive
Tech Stack
- MLAG
- Spine-and-Leaf architecture
- XMPP
- JSON RPC
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Energy Saving
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Applicable Industries
- National Security & Defense
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Facility Management
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
- Energy Management System
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
The Polish National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCNR) is one of the oldest and largest research institutes in Poland, established in 1955. It has a world-class combination of pure research and numerous practical applications for science and the wider economy. NCNR is one of only a handful of world suppliers of particle accelerators for industry and medicine, as well as an operator of the only nuclear reactor in Poland. It is a key Technical Support Organisation (TSO) for the national nuclear power program. The institute cooperates with leading universities and R&D centres, including close links with CERN, the largest scientific laboratory ever built. NCNR offers its unique research infrastructure for domestic and foreign scientists. A crucial part of NCNR’s resources is the Świerk Computing Centre, one of the largest supercomputers in Poland and the region, established in 2009 with aid from the European Regional Development Fund and co-financing by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The main goal of the supercomputing resource is to provide IT support for the development of the Polish nuclear and conventional energy sector.
The Challenge
The Polish National Centre for Nuclear Research and its Świerk Computing Centre needed to improve its core network infrastructure to facilitate the upgrade of its supercomputing resources and provide a more efficient foundation for further growth. The centre was continually looking at technologies to help it harness its vast computing capability and mitigate any technical hurdles to help it deliver its world-class research capabilities. Although currently undergoing a validation process, the installation is likely to be categorized as one of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world and certainly in the top 3 in Poland. The strategic goal is to build a unique science and technology competence centre to support the development of the Polish energy sector and all related fields of science. To meet this aim, an architecture refresh would be required to allow the cluster to scale as needed, but with particular care to avoid any bottlenecks that could impact future performance. One such area of particular concern was the core networking technology that would underpin the centre for the next decade of expansion.
The Solution
NCNR specified an open tender to a number of suppliers for both compute and networking upgrades, with the technical team at the centre scrutinising every response. The bar regarding the technological requirements was placed very high. Building HPC clusters requires a sufficiently large bandwidth of individual network connections as well as very small delays in data transmission. The HPC cluster will be expanded in the future, so scalability was a very important aspect when choosing an appropriate network solution. Traditional Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) solutions were considered unsuitable, so all vendors were obliged to offer Multi Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) functionality. Due to the MLAG approach and Spine-and-Leaf architecture implemented in Arista network devices, NCNR was able to opt out of the traditional L2 loop-free mechanism offered by STP and use the capabilities of installed devices in more efficient ways. The MLAG protocol and Spine-and-Leaf architecture also offer a higher availability level as there is no single point of failure in the whole network. The advantage of the solution offered by Arista is a combination of MLAG functionality with very low packet latency, which is a very important feature when it comes to distributed calculations. Additionally, these switches are characterized by extremely low energy consumption, up to three times less than competitors offering similar functionality. Another feature of interest was the ability to create application scripts directly within the Arista switches to perform complex cluster management processes with much greater efficiency and fewer performance overheads.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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