Notes

Submissions Due July 31, 2006

Acceptance Notification August 31, 2006

Accepted Posters

1. NDL Poster

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StarPlanePoster

Abstract
StarPlane is a research project that will investigate sub-second topology changes and lightpath provisioning in the SURFnet6 network in The Netherlands. Computing nodes from the academic cluster DAS-3 can connect to the photonic portion of SURFnet6 using different logical network topologies that satisfy the needs of the application at hand: the application requests a topology through the Starplane management plane, which in turn -constraints permitting- will instruct the appropriate devices to reconfigure. In this poster we will outline 1) which applications benefit from different logical topologies and their requirements for StarPlane operation; 2) the network architecture that StarPlane operates on and in particular the Nortel CPL (Common Photonic Layer) devices that are installed in SURFnet6; 3) the future design of the management plane and its interaction with the application on the cluster side and the photonic network devices in SURFnet6.

Supplementary Doc
by Li Xu*, Paola Grosso, Jan-Philip Velders and Cees de Laat

This document introduces the most important concepts related to our poster. It covers the StarPlane project, the Nortel CPL and WSS setup in the SURFnet6 network, the DAS-3 architecture, and last the design of the StarPlane control and management planes.

The StarPlane project overview
In recent years there has been an increasing demand from scientific applications for more network flexibility and guaranteed bandwidth services; these requests can be accommodated on photonic networks with the creation of dedicated lightpaths. In this lightpath world, it would be desirable for applications to have even more dynamic control over the allocation of network resources, such as requesting the on-demand partitioning of network resources or the modification of the network topology at runtime.

StarPlane[1] is a research project that investigates how to enable applications to dynamically manage and control photonic networks. The project takes advantage of two new infrastructures: the hybrid SURFnet6 network and the DAS-3 grid cluster; it will develop the management and control plane that will enable applications to access, manage and use the network resources in a real time fashion.

Via the management plane, applications running on the DAS-3 clusters can dynamically request the network topology that best suits their requirements. The control plane builds the requested topology by reconfiguring the devices in the StarPlane network to create a set of end-to-end lightpaths.

Large data transfer, latency or bandwidth sensitive applications, like e-VLBI[2], medical imaging or multimedia processing applications could all benefit from StarPlane.

SURFnet6 network
SURFnet[3] is the national academic and research network that connects all universities, high education, scientific and research institutes in the Netherlands. The latest generation of that network, SURFnet6, is a high-speed hybrid optical and packet switching infrastructure that provides both IP-based and lightpath provisioned services over a single transmission infrastructure. This hybrid network architecture enables to precisely tune the bandwidth allocation to the demand of users. SURFnet6 can set up point-to-point lightpaths that give large dedicated paths to data streams, without impacting the IP network.

SURFnet6 uses optical devices from Nortel including a self-optimizing DWDM transport platform known as Common Photonic Layer (CPL), and Wavelength Selectable Switches (WSS). These WSS are particularly important for StarPlane because their main feature is to select the input wavelengths and redirect them to specific output ports. These devices allow StarPlane to flexibly reconfigure the network and change the logical network topology in short (subsecond) time-scales.

The DAS-3 architecture
The applications that will make use of StarPlane run on the DAS-3 cluster; the third incarnation of the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer [4] (DAS), an experimental test-bed that provides a Grid infrastructure for experimental computer science research in the Netherlands. It is used for research on wide-area distributed and parallel applications. The system is composed of five clusters with 270 dual-node supercomputers in total, which are integrated into a single large-scale distributed system via SURFnet6.

Each cluster is comprised of a series of compute nodes, one head node, a LAN connection to the Internet utilizing the local university’s SURFnet6 IP uplink and several WAN connections to the SURFnet6 CPL network. The StarPlane project configures this WAN/CPL connection, and establishes lightpaths through the photonic infrastructure.
The role of control/management plane
As mentioned above, StarPlane consists of a control plane and a management plane. The management plane handles the high-level requests coming from the application. It defines an intelligent resource broker, the web services interfaces to applications and the authorization mechanisms (Generic AAA[5]) used to qualify the incoming requests. The resource broker maintains information on the available resources at each site and on the current and upcoming network topology reservations.

The control plane is responsible for the low-level control of the photonic hardware; it will most likely use GMPLS software to control the WSS and the CPL nodes in SURFnet6.

To successfully mediate the communication between the DAS-3 cluster and the photonic network devices, the management plane needs to decide upon and translate the high-level application requests to the low-level commands known by the photonic network. In other words, the applications, the management plane and the photonic devices will have a common semantic to which all the components can refer.

References
[1] Website of the StarPlane project

[2] Website of e-VLBI

[3] SURFnet network

[4] Website of Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS)

[5] Generic Authorization Authentication and Accounting (Generic AAA)

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NDLPoster