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Fiber to the Desk Service Information

Overview

Optical fiber connections allows higher-end devices to connect to the HSRN at incredibly fast speeds and low latency. Only higher-end PCs with specialized configurations will be able to make use of the full bandwidth available, which typically requires powerful CPUs and fast storage backends. This section will go over details necessary to understand deployments over fiber via HSRN.

Service Offerings

The following connectivity options are currently supported in all our locations:

  • 100 Gbps (45 TB per hour) fiber to the computer for workstations, NAS, servers, instruments
  • 2x100 Gbps (90 TB per hour) fiber to the computer for workstations, NAS, servers, instruments. Requires dual-port network card

Benefits of Fiber Optics

The traditional network medium of copper cables is likely to not exceed 10 Gbps due to physical constraints. To achieve any throughput higher than 10 Gbps, it will be necessary to switch to fiber optics. Fiber optics allows for massive amounts of data to be transmitted over a single fiber cable and innovations continue to push this higher. This is infrastructure typically only available in datacenters or in large content providers. With this state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure, it is possible to drastically speed up internal data transfers, scale volume of data collected in experiments by orders of magnitude, or send / receive data at massive throughputs from large science facilities and collaborators around the world.

Differences to Traditional Copper Connections

Fiber connections directly to end-PCs allows them to communicate across the HSRN and beyond at incredibly high throughputs and low latencies that are not possible over copper connections. Fiber cabling is much more delicate than traditional copper cables and must be handled with care. It is important to not bend the cabling, or leave the cabling unplugged, which may get the fiber dirty.

Traditional network cards will NOT work with fiber optics and will typically need to be procured.

Fiber Distribution at NYU

Fiber is distributed around NYU mainly in the form of Fiber Distribution Boxes, which are installed in lab areas and carry around 6 pairs of optical fiber. Each connection requires 2 pairs, thus allowing for 6 connections per box. To connect, use a Single Mode Fiber (LC Connector) cable from the box to your computer.

Fiber Distribution Boxes are installed as part of HSRN initial buildouts in target locations and may be in your lab area already. If there is NOT any Fiber Distribution Boxes in a particular area that requires service, this will need to be procured and installed and will need to be paid for by the researcher or department. Typically this would be $2500 per box (6 total connections).

Computer Requirements

PCs and servers that are targetted for fiber must be higher-end in order to make full use of the bandwidth. Overall throughput in data transfers typically requires fast storage, fast CPUs, and fast networking equipment. If any of these are slow, the throughput will be bottlenecked.

Laptops and smaller form-factor devices will NOT be able to connect via fiber. Only desktops, servers or NAS typically can connect over fiber.

Storage

Storage capable of achieving high throughputs is typically dependent on the number of drives available, as well as the RAID configuration. For a Network Attached Storage (NAS) configuration which have large amounts of drives, it may be possible to use RAID 5 or RAID 6 which allow for redundamcy as well as increased performance. For a higher-end workstation device with less than 3 drives, a RAID 0 configuration using NVMe drives is typically required to achieve higher throughputs. We recommend using a lighter workstation for data acquisition with RAID 0, and transfer data to central NAS using RAID 5 or 6 for storage.

Please note that devices using HDDs will typically not be able to achieve speeds exceeding 10 Gbps, and thus a Ethernet port upgrade to 10 Gbps would make more sense. Fiber would not make sense for these hosts as they cannot push the throughput anyways. For these hosts please see Ethernet port upgrades documentation.

CPU

The CPU in a PC is critical to moving data from the system to the network wire. It is critical that CPUs are within the last 2-3 generations in order to be able to push the full 100 Gbps over the wire. For desktop processors, we recommend higher end AMD 9000 series processors. For server-grade CPUs, we recommend getting a CPU which has higher base clocks.

Network Interface Cards

Network Interface Cards (NICs) typically found in servers out-of-the-box will NOT work with fiber and will need to be procured. NICs for optical communication also require a accompanying transceiver, a small pluggable device that needs to be inserted into the NIC. There is strict compatibility between NIC and transceiver and we provide links for ones that have been validated.

NICs for optical fiber are installed into available PCIe slots that have a minimum form factor and generation requirement. They require a PCIe 4x16 slot, similar to a modern GPU. Consult your motherboard user manual or placards to determine this slot information. Resources to install Network Interface Cards can be found online here (FS) and here (Youtube).

Transceiver

Transceivers are specialized devices that convert electrical signals to light and are a required additional piece of equipment needed to use HSRN fiber. The transceiver will be inserted into the Network Interface Card and a fiber cable will be connected from the transceiver to the fiber distribution box.

Hardware Procurement Recommendations

For 100 Gbps fiber connectivity, we recommend:

  • NVIDIA (Mellanox) ConnectX-6 VPI MCX651105A-EDAT, available from FS.com and on I-BUY from CONNECTION
  • Mellanox MMS1V70-CM Compatible 100GBASE-DR Optical Transceiver, available from FS.com
  • Fiber Patch Cable, LC UPC to LC UPC, Duplex, available from FS.com (size variable).

Note you will need BOTH the Network card and the transceiver to connect. While there are other network cards available, you will always need the 100GBASE-DR transceiver specifically. Other transceivers may not work on the HSRN.

The supported operating systems of this card and transceiver are below.

Windows Operating Systems supported are below:

  • Windows 8.1 (64 Bit)
  • Windows 10 (64 Bit)
  • Windows 11 (64 Bit)
  • Windows Server 2012 (R2)
  • Windows Server 2016
  • Windows Server 2019
  • Windows Server 2022

Linux support includes (but not limited to):

  • Ubuntu
  • RHEL/Centos/Rocky
  • Oracle Linux
  • Fedora
  • Debian

See also the specific kernel versions and Linux distribution list.

Support

If you have further questions or would like more guidance and hands-on support, please reach out to us at hsrn-support@nyu.edu.