Speaker
P. DeMar
(FERMILAB)
Description
Advanced optical-based networks have the capacity and capability to meet the
extremely large data movement requirements of particle physics collaborations. To
date, research efforts in the advanced network area have been primarily been focused
on provisioning, dynamically configuring, and monitoring the wide area optical
network infrastructure itself. Application use of these facilities has been largely
limited to demonstrations using prototype high performance computing systems.
Fermilab has initiated a project to enable our production network facilities to
exploit these advanced research networks. Our objective is to selectively forward
designated data transfers, on a per-flow basis, between capacious production-use
storage systems on local campus networks, using a dynamically provisioned alternate
path on a wide area advanced research network. To accomplish this, it is necessary
to develop the capability to dynamically reconfigure forwarding of specific flows
within our local production-use routers, provide an interface that enables
applications to utilize the service, and dynamically implement appropriate access
control on the alternate network path. Our project involves developing that
infrastructure. We call it LambdaStation. If one envisions wide area optical
network paths as high bandwidth data railways, then LambdaStation would functionally
be the railroad terminal that regulates which flows at the local site get directed
onto the high bandwidth data railways. LambdaStation is in a very early stage of
development. Our paper will discuss its design, early deployment experiences, and
future directions for the project.
Authors
D. Petravick
(FERMILAB)
P. DeMar
(FERMILAB)
