ultrascience net: high-performance network research test...

UltraScience Net: High-Performance NetworkResearch Test-Bed

NAGESWARA S. V. RAO1, WILLIAM R. WING1,SUSAN E. HICKS1, STEPHEN W. POOLE1, FRANK A. DENAP1,STEVEN M. CARTER2, and QISHI WU3

1Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA2University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA3Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA, USA

The high-performance networking requirements for next generation large-scale applications belongto two broad classes: a) high bandwidths, typically multiples of 10Gbps, to support bulk datatransfers, and b) stable bandwidths, typically at much lower bandwidths, to support computationalsteering, remote visualization, and remote control of instrumentation.

Current Internet technologies, however, are severely limited in meeting these demands becausesuch bulk bandwidths are available only in the backbone, and stable control channels are hard to realizeover shared connections. The UltraScience Net (USN) facilitates the development of such technologiesby providing dynamic, cross-country dedicated 10Gbps channels for large data transfers, and 150 Mbpschannels for interactive and control operations. Contributions of the USN project are two-fold:

a. Infrastructure Technologies for Network Experimental Facility: USN developed and/or demon-strated a number of infrastructure technologies needed for a national-scale network experimentalfacility. Compared to Internet, USN’s data-plane is different in that it can be partitioned into isolatedlayer-1 or layer-2 connections, and its control-plane is different in the ability of users and applica-tions to setup and tear down channels as needed. Its design required several new componentsincluding a Virtual Private Network infrastructure, a bandwidth and channel scheduler, and adynamic signaling daemon. The control-plane employs a centralized scheduler to compute thechannel allocations and a signaling daemon to generate configuration signals to switches. In anutshell, USN demonstrated the ability to build and operate a stable national-scale switched network.

b. Structured Network Research Experiments: A number of network research experiments have beenconducted on USN that cannot be easily supported over existing network facilities, including test-beds and production networks. It settled an open matter by demonstrating that the performance ofswitched connections and Multiple Protocol Label Switching tunnels over routed networks arecomparable. Furthermore, such connections can be easily peered, and the performance of theresultant hybrid connections is still comparable to the constituent pure connections. USN experi-ments demonstrated that Infiniband transport can be effectively extended to wide-area connectionsof thousands of miles, which opens up new opportunities for efficient bulk data transport. USNprovided dedicated connections to Cray X1 supercomputer and helped diagnose TCP performanceproblems which might have been otherwise incorrectly attributed to traffic on shared connections.USN contributed to the development of transport methods for dedicated connections to other traffic.Recently, experiments were conducted to assess the performance of application acceleration devicesthat employ flow optimization and data compression methods to improve TCP performance.

Keywords Network test-bed; Dedicated channels; SONET; 10GigE WAN-PHY; Control-plane;Data-plane; Bandwidth scheduler

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 5: 5, 2009

Copyright � Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1550-1329 print / 1550-1477 online

DOI: 10.1080/15501320802498489

Address correspondence to Nageswara S. V. Rao, Computer Science & Math Division, OakRidge National Laboratory, Oak Rigde, TN 37831, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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