NERSC Network

The NERSC network consists of a border router which connects multiple internal subnets to ESnet. The ESnet connection to NERSC is through the 10Gbit (gigabit) Bay Area Metropolitan Area Network (BA-MAN). Each subnet consists of a high speed layer 2 switch which connects to the border router via some combination of 10Gbit, dual 1Gbit (etherchannel) or single 1Gbit ethernets and supports 100/1000/10000 Mbps connections.Some examples of major internal subnets are the PDSF Subnet which contains the PDSF Linux cluster.

Traffic Statistics

Network traffic statistics are collected every five minutes and can be displayed for each border router interface in daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. Alternatively, a current traffic summary consisting of the daily graph for each interface can be displayed on one page.

About the Traffic Statistics

Border Router Statistics:

• ESnet BA MAN Link
• PDSF Subnet

End-to-end data transfer optimization

Attempting to move large datasets to/from NERSC and having difficulties? NERSC can help! We have expertise in large network transfers and are happy to work with clients to improve transfer performance. Most machines have not been properly tuned to make large transfers across the WAN. With a few simple adjustments you could see a 5x improvement.

• Try our End-to-End NDT test page to measure performance from your workstation to NERSC's Production network. Just connect from a Java-enabled browser, and click the "Start" button. Your results will appear in ~20-30 seconds. if you feel that your results indicate a problem, please copy the output from the test and send an email to consult@nersc.gov.


• You can also try our NPAD tester here
• We also have an 'iperf' server available for you to test to. iperf.nersc.gov is front-ended by bwctl to manage the number of concurrent connections.

Please contact user services for assistance with network tuning for large data transfers.

Network Requests

• Open Port Requests