SingAREN Tech Talks: “From classical to quantum networking: Leveraging networks to advance distributed science” by Dr Rajkumar Kettimuthu (ANL)
21 Jun 2024 – SingAREN had the honour to invite Dr. Rajkumar Kettimuthu from the prestigious Argonne National Laboratory on 27 May 2024 to share his knowledge on (a) the evolution of communication requirements of distributed science in networking; and (b) the emerging field of Quantum networking.
The audience was captivated by the rich history of how a simple File Transfer Protocol concept (FTP) for data transfer over classical networking in the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) started as early as the mid-1990s. Three decades later, we have progressed to a highly secure, reliable, high-performant and fire-and-forget cloud-hosted file transfer service. He shared with the participants the architecture of SciStream, which enables distributed scientific workflows to use their choice of data streaming tools to stream data from the memory of a scientific instrument (residing in one private network) to the memory of HPC nodes (residing in another private network).
He discussed the Quantum networking concepts, the potential architectural choices, and how entanglement-based Quantum networks are being demonstrated by different research groups. He showcased Argonne’s recent development in Quantum networking, including the fiber-based campus scale and metropolitan scale quantum network demonstrations by his group. He also talked about their new project “InterQnet”, which aims to (a) network heterogeneous qubit platforms; and (b) perform simulation studies to understand the trade-offs in designing scalable quantum networks. Thus, Quantum Networks is not so far in the future.
A big thank you to all those who participated in this informative talk, and a special thanks to Dr Kettimuthu who made this possible.
This article was co-edited by Dr Kettimuthu (ANL) and Vee Len (SingAREN)