Inder Monga

An extensible, programmable, commercial-grade platform for internet service architecture

With their increasingly sophisticated applications, users promote the notion that there is more to a network (be it an intranet, or the Internet) than mere L1-3 connectivity. In what shapes a next generation service contract between users and the network, users want the network to offer services that are as ubiquitous and dependable as dial tones. Typical services include application-aware firewalls, directories, nomadic support, virtualization, load balancing, alternate site failover, etc. To fulfill this vision, a service architecture is needed. That is, an architecture wherein end-to-end services compose, on-demand, across network domains, technologies, and administration boundaries. Such an architecture requires programmable mechanisms and programmable network devices for service enabling, service negotiation, and service management. The bedrock foundation of the architecture, and also the key focus of the paper, is an open-source programmable service platform that is explicitly designed to best exploit commercial-grade network devices. The platform predicates a full separation of concerns, in that control-intensive operations are executed in software, whereas, data-intensive operations are delegated to hardware. This way, the platform is capable of performing wire-speed content filtering, and activating network services according to the state of data and control flows. The paper describes the platform and some distinguishing services realized on the platform.

DWDM-RAM: a data intensive Grid service architecture enabled by dynamic optical networks

Next generation applications and architectures (for example, Grids) are driving radical changes in the nature of traffic, service models, technology, and cost, creating opportunities for an advanced communications infrastructure to tackle next generation data services. To take advantage of these trends and opportunities, research communities are creating new architectures, such as the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA), which are being implemented in new prototype advanced infrastructures. The DWDM-RAM project, funded by DARPA, is actively addressing the challenges of next generation applications. DWDM-RAM is an architecture for data-intensive services enabled by next generation dynamic optical networks. It develops and demonstrates a novel architecture for new data communication services, within the OGSA context, that allows for managing extremely large sets of distributed data. Novel features move network services beyond notions of the network as a managed resource, for example, by including capabilities for dynamic on-demand provisioning and advance scheduling. DWDM-RAM encapsulates optical network resources (Lambdas, lightpaths) into a Grid service and integrates their management within the Open Grid Service Architecture. Migration to emerging standards such as WS-Resource Framework (WS-RF) should be straightforward. In initial applications, DWDM-RAM targets specific data-intensive services such as rapid, massive data transfers used by large scale eScience applications, including: high-energy physics, geophysics, life science, bioinformatics, genomics, medical morphometry, tomography, microscopy imaging, astronomical and astrophysical imaging, complex modeling, and visualization.

Carbon-aware path provisioning for NRENs

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are becoming keener in providing information on the energy consumption of their equipment. However there are only few NRENs trying to use the available information to reduce power consumption and/or carbon footprint. We set out to study the impact that deploying energy-aware networking devices may have in terms of CO2 emissions, taking the ESnet network as use case. We defined a model that can be used to select paths that lead to a lower impact on the CO2 footprint of the network. We implemented a simulation of the ESnet network using our model to investigate the CO2 footprint under different traffic conditions. Our results suggest that NRENs such as ESnet could reduce their networks environmental impact if they would deploy energy-aware hardware combined with paths setup tailored to reduction of carbon footprint. This could be achieved by modification of the current path provisioning systems used in the NREN community.

Token based networking: experiment NL-101

This short communication outlines an experiment where tokens, associated with application oriented IP streams, authorize access to an optical lightpath during iGrid 2005. The experiment showed the practical viability of this mechanism to perform access control and resource management within optical networks. The experiment was conducted in collaboration with the Virtual Machine Turntable (NL-103) experiment, which used the mechanism to obtain access to continental and transatlantic optical network segments that connected Virtual Machine sites.

Collaborative Research Using eScience Infrastructure and High Speed Networks

Modern science is generating large amounts of data and timely movement of data for analysis is a crucial aspect for the emerging international scientific collaborations. Infrastructural resources such as instruments, storage, computing facilities and visualization (e.g. tiled displays, 4K video, holography) are increasingly used and shared by researchers at geographically distributed locations [1,2]. High-speed networks are supposed to enable the use and sharing of these resources over long distances, especially when point-to-point connections with a high, guaranteed bandwidth and low latency and security (aka lightpaths) are used. In many countries, the National Research and EducationNetworks (NREN’s) offer such lightpath services. The NRENs collaborate with each, for example by participating in GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility [3], to provide lightpaths internationally in support of dataintensive scientific research. NRENs andGLIF have been amotor for novel use cases of the networks. Unfortunately such lightpaths do not extend to storage and compute resources on campus, which causes end-to-end application throughput to suffer. The Science DMZ [4] architecture is one effort targeted to facilitate better wide-area network (WAN) data transfer throughput in addition to lightpaths. As network resources from NREN’s become virtualized and made available to users, they can be stitched together and combined with other virtualized services (such as storage and compute servers) to create an end-to-end converged virtual infrastructure. The introduction of the standardized NSI protocol [5], which enables the reservation and control of heterogeneous resources among multiple domains, greatly facilitates this virtualization and convergence. This opens up many new possibilities, such as the use of very high resolution cinema on large tiled display walls, using multi-model/multi-kernel simulations using a distributed compute infrastructure or perform novel network experiments with new protocols over a virtualized infrastructure. This special section focuses on two aspects central to collaborative research in these advanced infrastructures: