Grid5000:Network

The network infrastructure of Grid'5000 is provided by RENATER

RENATER is the French National Telecommunication Network for Technology, Education and Research. More information can be found on our web site: http://www.renater.fr

RENATER offers about 30 POPs (Points Of Presence) in France, at least one POP for each region, on which are connected metropolitan and regional networks. More than 600 sites (Universities, Research Centers, ..) are interconnected through RENATER.

The actual phase of the network is RENATER-4, the deployement has been completed by November 2005.

The "standard" architecture is based on 2,5Gbit/s leased lines and provides IP transit connectivity, interconnection with GEANT-2 (http://www.geant2.net/), overseas territories and the SFINX (Global Internet exchange).

The first design of the interconnection of Grid'5000 sites is based on this infrastructure.

RENATER-4 also introduced a dark fiber infrastructure allowing to allocate dedicated 10Gbit/s "lambda" for specific research projects. Again it also provides interconnection with GEANT-2 (see picture above).

This new infrastructure is still under deployment (April 2006) and Grid'5000 sites are connected to it, one by one, as soon as it is available. Eventually the dark fiber infrastructure will provide for Grid'5000 10Gbit/s point to point interconnection inside a single VLAN.

The picture above shows the current state of the architecture (along with the maximun of lambdas which can be allocated on each link).