P31: Parallelizing OpenVPN for High-Bandwidth Cluster Integration Session: Posters: Networking Event Type: Poster Time: 5:00pm - 7:00pm Speaker(s): Jens Mache, Damon Tyman, Andre Pinter, Chris Allick Location: 4th Floor South Lobby Abstract: VPN technology is a building block for integrating geographically distributed clusters. However, as the speed of wide-area networks continues to increase (for instance 40 Gbps for the Teragrid), it becomes increasingly difficult for a single-node VPN to encrypt inter-cluster traffic fast enough. If the VPN cannot keep up, your effective network bandwidth and runtime of jobs will be negatively affected. Running the NetIO benchmark on a testbed consisting of two clusters (of low-end Athlon CPUs) with a Gigabit Ethernet inter-clutser link, we measured an average of 301.16 Mbps without OpenVPN and 83.73 Mbps with. As a solution, we set out to parallelize the OpenVPN software by distributing the cryptographic calculations to additional nodes (VPN booster nodes). Since the CPU load on the single-node VPN gateway was maxed-out in our initial experiments, we expect the effective network bandwidth to increase with each additional booster node. Chair/Speaker Details: Jens Mache Lewis & Clark College Damon Tyman Lewis & Clark College Andre Pinter Lewis & Clark College Chris Allick Lewis & Clark College