At SC07, Internet2, together with several partners and collaborators, demonstrated for the first time interoperability of its Dynamic Circuit (DC) Network with multiple regional and international networks, as well as an equipment provider. The interoperability of the Inter-Domain Controller (IDC) protocol, being developed in a collaboration between GEANT2, Internet2 and ESnet, is made possible through emerging network markup language (NML) standards being developed in the Open Grid Forum.

"For many years, Internet2 has been a contributor to the OGF standards process and we believe it plays a critical role in engaging and advancing the broad Internet development community," said Eric Boyd, Internet2 deputy technology officer. "It's gratifying to see the results of our community's efforts instantiated in new standards-based software that will provide immediate benefits to our members and the global networking and grid community."

The Internet2 demonstrations showcased interoperability with ESnet, GEANT2 in Europe, NYSERNET in New York, the Great Plains Network (GPN), GRNET in Greece, HEAnet in Ireland, Merit Network, Northern Crossroads (NoX), a Nortel Network based in Ottawa, Canada, the PIONIER network in Poland, and the Phosphorus testbed at the University of Amsterdam via SURFnet's NetherLight GLIF Open Lambda Exchange in Amsterdam.

In doing so, the SC07 demonstration marked a major first step in enabling the widespread adoption of dynamic circuit networking by showcasing how networks with different equipment, network technology and allocation models can dynamically provision dedicated circuits across domains.

Dynamic circuit networks use Web services to provide on-demand or scheduled dedicated point-to-point bandwidth, in the spirit of grid computing, to enable the most intensive applications for research and education to allocate the resources that they need when they need them. These include applications like massive terabyte-sized data transfers that will be critical for the high-energy physics community when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online next year.

In addition to the NML standards, Internet2, together with several collaborators, also demonstrated the perfSONAR framework, which is built on standards developed under the direction of the OGF Network Monitoring Working Group (NMWG). The core of the perfSONAR framework comprises a set of open protocol standards for interoperability between measurement and monitoring systems. Overall, perfSONAR can be viewed as a set of open source Web services that can be combined and extended to create a real-time performance-monitoring framework. As the protocols and models are open, deployments may choose between various implementations, and may deploy as much or as little of the infrastructure as desired.

At SC07, perfSONAR was utilized to provide performance data on the Internet2 dynamic circuit network demonstrations. Because it is designed to understand the underlying topology of a network, including the complex hybrid IP/circuit network topologies that exist on the Internet2 Network, perfSONAR collected and reported performance data on the IP and dynamic circuit network links and provided visualization of the multiple-gigabit data flows.

perfSONAR's ability to share network diagnostic information across administrative domains makes it an important tool for projects like the LHC, and other collaborations between multiple national and international organizations. perfSONAR simplifies the troubleshooting and evaluation of performance issues across networks -- ”allowing network administrators to diagnose and verify network problems across complex multi-domain topologies in near real time.

Jeff Boote, senior network software engineer for the Internet2 Performance Architecture Team, noted: "Developers of grid applications have long sought mechanisms to enable consistent and accurate feedback about network performance. perfSONAR allows the network to provide this critical information proactively, which in turn allows developers and users to make intelligent resource decisions at application run time. By identifying performance issues on the spot, we believe perfSONAR can have a major impact on the future proliferation of grids and other high-impact applications which depend upon network reliability and performance."

-----

Source: Internet2