Quartzite: A Campus-Scale Hybrid Networking Infrastructure

Quartzite is a hybrid wavelength - packet switched network on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. One of the key goals is to enable reconfigurations of the network at the physical (fiber, wavelength) and logical level (VLAN and routed) to support bandwidth intensive applications, non-standard protocols and other experiments that are usually incompatible with "production" networks. The structure of Quartzite is to connect laboratories on campus to a hybrid network core consisting of a standard, production switch router, and all-optical switch, and DWDM wavelength-selective switch (WSS). All components of Quartzite (except a custom-built WSS) are available as commodity parts. Most links feeding into the core are 10 Gigabit/s Ethernet (long reach grey, and C-band DWDM) with a smaller number of 1 gigabit/s links. More than 0.5 Terabit/s is currently provisioned to connect layer2 switches and directly-connected computing or storage endpoints. The entire infrastructure (including connected endpoints) can be reconfigured to suit the needs of specific experiments. The all-optical switching and wavelength switching are signal agnostic allowing non-ethernet transports to utilize the network/fiber infra-structure.