Logistical Networking: A Scalable Storage Architecture for Data Intensive Collaboration

by Micah Beck (University of Tennessee, USA)

Monday 9 Sept 2002, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

The current model for collaboration in the wide area is to build isolated islands of resources seperately owned and controlled by collaborating organizations and to connect them using data transmission networks, generally IP-based. In this talk, we will propose Logistical Networking as a new model in which organizations provision storage resources for the purpose of sharing them with their collaborators, much as data transmission resources are provisioned in an IP network. The premise of this proposal is that in a data intensive collaborative environment, it is important for each collaborator to be able to flexibly utilize storage resources at any location in the network. One of the reasons that IP networking has become the ubiquitous mechanism for sharing data transmisison resources has been its scalability, a characteristic that is largely due to observing the so-called 'end-to-end' architectural principles. One of the reasons that storage resources could not in the past be widely deployed for shared use is that there was no network storage mechanism that similarly observed those principles. We will introduce a new storage mechanism, the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP), that is the foundation of the Logistical Networking architecture and show that it does observe the end-to-end principles. We will also describe the other components of the Logistical Networking architecture, which include resource discovery and 'end-to-end' services that ensure reliability, high performance and security. Researchers at the Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory at the University of Tennessee have been pursuing the development of these mechanisms and their integration into middleware and applications. Data intensive science applications are of particular interest, as they place a uniquely heavy load on data transmission resources. Of particular interest is the possibility of integrating high bandwidth data transmission mechanisms other than TCP/IP to transport data between IBP storage nodes while still maintaining interoperability with current IP research networks. Logistical Networking deployment efforts are focused on a multi-terabyte Logsitical Backbone testbed, currently in the U.S. and Europe, and a proposed petabyte-scale Logistical Networking Testbed that would span universities and research labs worldwide.