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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Networking:
MCNC Demonstrates Next Generation
Optical Networking Protocol
An optical network provisioning protocol to enable more efficient computing
applications has been successfully demonstrated by scientists at MCNC Research
& Development Institute and North Carolina State University.
The demonstration of the Just-in-Time (JIT) protocol for provisioning and
managing light path connections in the all-optical Advanced Technology
Demonstration Network (ATDnet) in Washington, D.C., confirmed the viability of
user-initiated, ultra-fast provisioning of all-optical network connections and
marked the transition of the JIT protocol from the laboratory to an
operational network. The light paths linked host systems at the U.S.
Department of Defense's Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, the Naval
Research Laboratory's Center for Computational Science and the Defense
Intelligence Agency.
An overview of the JIT protocol was presented in December at the Globecom
2003
conference's Optical Networking and Systems Symposium in San Francisco by Dan
Stevenson, vice president of MCNC-RDI's Advanced Network Research
Division.
JIT will provide much needed support to U.S. military and civilian
researchers
to solve real-world problems. In particular, the Naval Research Laboratory is
interested in the protocol's ability to quickly set up and release tens,
possibly hundreds, of gigabits of bandwidth for demanding, high-performance
computing applications such as immersive real-time visualization of satellite
imagery, computational fluid dynamics, ocean and weather modeling, and space
physics.
"JIT addresses some very challenging problems in high-performance
computing,"
said Dr. Hank Dardy, chief scientist for advanced computing at the Naval
Research Laboratory's Center for Computational Science. "It can take weeks to
establish an optical connection through a carrier network, and minutes to do
so with generalized multi-protocol label switching, the current industry
standard. With JIT, we can provision optical connections between sites in a
few milliseconds through our microelectromechanical switches, and in a few
microseconds when we deploy faster photonic switches."
The JIT architecture and protocols used in the ATDnet were jointly
developed
by researchers at MCNC and Professors Paul Franzon, Harry Perros and George
Rouskas of North Carolina State University. The research was partially funded
by NASA and supported by the Advanced Research and Development Activity, a
Department of Defense research and development community for the development
of information technologies that current networks, including today's Internet,
do not or cannot support.
"This is the first deployment of its kind in an operational network at
greater
than gigabit speeds," Stevenson said. "JIT is especially attractive to
government customers because it doesn't necessarily care about data rate or
data format, not even whether the signal is digital or analog. Also, it works
with commercial, off-the-shelf equipment from multiple vendors and multiple
optical switching technologies."
Fast, real-time resource provisioning will enable the military, particle
physics, and research communities to focus on problems in new ways. Stevenson
said that JIT overcomes many limitations and problems inherent with the
current Internet. Applications can request, use and release bandwidth when
needed, without tying up an optical circuit for days.
"High-speed, on-demand, application-initiated provisioning of bandwidth is
also what the Grid computing community is demanding," Stevenson said. Grids
connect heterogeneous computing platforms so that they operate, and appear to
the user, as a single computing system. This means that computational problems
can be directed to a system within the Grid that will process it in the
quickest and most cost effective manner. Grid computing provides users with
unprecedented computing power, services and information, combing the resources
of heterogeneous computing resources no matter where they are located.
"Grid resource requirements of big science applications, such as particle
physics, are very dynamic," said Stevenson. "The goal for sparse networks like
ATDnet, and the recently announced National Lamda Rail, is to share Grid
bandwidth the same way you share computing cycles and storage in the Grid. You
also want to use those resources efficiently. These applications often involve
computational steering and cannot afford the latency associated with
electronic routers. The applications may require 300 megabits per second, but
that's only a small percentage of a 10-gigabit optical channel. JIT lets you
share the remaining 97 percent of that bandwidth with others on the Grid
without the reduced performance inherent with electronic routing."
MCNC and the University of North Carolina 16-campus system are jointly
developing a statewide Grid computing network for North Carolina's higher
education community using the existing statewide North Carolina Research and
Education Network, operated by MCNC. The statewide research and education Grid
will link computing and data resources from multiple institutions in multiple
locations with the potential to vastly increase the resources available to
individual institutions. When complete, North Carolina will be one of the
first states in the nation to deploy a statewide Grid infrastructure.
"We intend to move JIT into Grid networks," said Stevenson. "We see the
Grid
as a widely distributed computing system, and optical networks as the
backplane for that system. We're working on several supporting technologies to
make that happen, such as protocols for QoS-aware routing, network management,
transport, security and authentication, and making JIT OGSI/OGSA (Open Grid
Services Infrastructure/Architecture) compliant. We're also developing
JIT-aware network adaptors so that high performance Grid servers and hosts can
take full advantage of JIT."
Stevenson also sees other applications. "We believe that JIT will scale to
finer timescales, and will support application-initiated provisioning of
bandwidth for optical burst switching where a connection is provisioned in
nanoseconds and may be released after only a few milliseconds," he said.
Optical burst switching is a high performance networking technology that
transports digital and analog data an order of magnitude faster than today's
digital electronic packet switched technologies.
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