This week, network engineers, architects and research facility experts from around the world meet in Naples for the 57th LHCOPN-LHCONE meeting. The meeting brings together the community who build and operate the networks that carry data for the experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The two-day meeting, on 1–2 October, was hosted by INFN Naples at the Centro Congressi Federico II on the Naples waterfront. Lars Fischer, Chief Relations Officer at NORDUnet, represented NORDUnet and the Nordic LHC infrastructure community. “The meeting provided new insights that will be important for planning and engineering among Nordic partners in the coming year”, says Lars Fischer.
A major user of R&E networks
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) distributes computing and storage centres across the globe so that physicists can analyse LHC data wherever they are, and deploy a large-scale, high-capacity network linking the centres together. WLCG is the single largest consumer of global research and education (R&E) network resources.
As a result, for two decades, WLCG has been a driver of the evolution of regional and global R&E networks. Two dedicated network infrastructures serve LHC: LHCOPN, the private optical network connecting CERN to the Tier-1 centres, and LHCONE, the global overlay network that connects Tier-1, Tier-2 and Tier-3 sites. WLCG has also pushed forward the platforms used to orchestrate, monitor and manage data movement and computation at very large scale. Other experiments, such as Belle II in Japan, now use the same infrastructure.
On the agenda in Naples
The meeting covered the status of LHCOPN, including progress towards making it IPv6-only network, and updates on LHCONE. Participants also discussed a new acceptable use policy, monitoring, host tuning and perimeter security.
Importantly, on the agenda was the evolution of WLCG towards support for the massively increased data rates of the High-Luminosity LHC later this decade, and the WLCG Data Challenge, planned for 2027, to test the progress of networks and sites to sustain these data rates. The agenda also featured the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Sessions covered SKA timelines, data movement in SRCNet, the network of SKA Regional Centres, and a proposal for a dedicated virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) instance for SKA traffic.
The final session focused on network research and development, including terabit-scale WAN testbeds, network analytics, packet marking for scientific traffic (Scitags) and end-to-end orchestrated network services.
A Key Forum for NORDUnet
NORDUnet provides network infrastructure for the Nordic WLCG Tier-1 centre, which is distributed across the Nordic countries. LHC data is one of the largest flows on the networks of the Nordic NRENs and NORDUnet, and understanding how that traffic will grow and change is essential for us to keep providing the service our community expects. Similarly, with Sweden as a core member of SKA, network support for data to travel between the telescope sites in Australia and South Africa and SKA Regional Centres is essential.
“For NORDUnet, the LHC networking meetings work as a radar,” says Lars Fischer. “They are a focal point for R&E network evolution and show us early what research will require from our networks in the future, and the challenges we will need to solve together with our partners to support global science.”
