Speakers
Description
Research and Education Networks (RENs) transport vast amounts of scientific data, but gaining granular visibility into this traffic is difficult. Understanding the composition of this traffic is essential for enabling efficient network use, traffic steering, future provisioning, and capacity planning. Traditional network flow data offers only limited insight into the specific activities driving bandwidth. The Scitags (Scientific Network Tags) initiative addresses this by providing an open platform to identify the "owner" and "purpose" of science flows. Scitags uses a public registry of standardized identifiers and implements generic packet and flow marking to enable precise traffic accounting and visibility for overlay networks like LHCOPN and LHCONE.
In this presentation, we focus on the deployment status and technical evolution of the Scitags ecosystem, specifically regarding readiness for the upcoming WLCG Data Challenge. We will detail the current support within data management systems (Rucio, DIRAC, Alice), storage infrastructures (XRootD, EOS, Storm, dCache, Echo, Pelican), as well as the readiness of REN collectors and dashboards. A key highlight of the talk is the introduction of flowd-go, a newly developed packet marking service designed for high-performance environments. We present an overview of the packet marking approach, the details of the 1.1 Tbps WAN Network Research Exhibition (NRE) demonstration at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analytics (SC25), and the prospects for implementing and using packet marking on production networks.