SCC has successfully put the first two 400 Gbit/s connections between the KIT Campus North and the KIT Campus South into operation. The new high-speed connections were implemented via the SCC site in Karlsruhe-Hagsfeld, as the necessary technical requirements were already in place for the connections via this site.
The additional bandwidth is needed in particular for the Tier-1 center GridKa in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). Following the planned upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is scheduled to be completed by 2030, GridKa will require a connection of up to 1.2 Tbit/s in the future. With the new connections, the SCC is laying the groundwork early on to reliably meet these requirements.
At the same time, the SCC is gaining initial practical experience with the new 400 Gbit/s technology: Modern transceivers in the routers directly generate the appropriate coherent laser light for wide-area networks. Compared to previous solutions with separate active components, this will reduce costs while also delivering higher availability.
The existing 100-Gbit/s connections between Campus North and Campus South will serve as backup links. With the planned upgrade in 2028, they are to be replaced by additional 400-Gbit/s links. With this expansion of the network infrastructure, the SCC is supporting researchers at KIT and beyond in reliably processing even larger volumes of data in the future and advancing cutting-edge international research.