Grid Meter » Grid Community Reaching for First OSCAR

November 15, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Grid Community Reaching for First OSCAR

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The Energy Science Network (serving the DOE) is working on a new network service that provides 'On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation Systems' (OSCARS). To put it simply, these are virtual circuits that provide guaranteed bandwidth between sites or hosts (rather than mixing with commodity Internet traffic).

William Johnston, Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explains why the science Grid community requires virtual circuits:

"You may have an experiment that produces a petabyte of data per year - and you know that you have to transfer a couple of terabytes per day from, say, CERN to Brookhaven. In order to do those transfers, you need virtual circuits with bandwidth guarantees, because otherwise you might not get enough of the bandwidth along the path to keep ahead of the data that's arriving.

The other area which I think virtual circuits will be needed for bandwidth guarantees, which is a completely different area, are Grid-based workflow systems. The high energy physics community will require a great deal of bandwidth to analyze all the data that's coming off the LHC. They're putting together large-scale Grids that involve hundreds of machines scattered across dozens of institutions. They will have workflow systems that manage the movement of work and the various steps at which it's being processed. Of course, many of the processing steps are in different machines, so the work flows into one machine, gets transformed, sent out to another machine, gets transformed, sent out to another machine, etc., etc. So you get these networks of workflow systems. Unless you have sufficient bandwidth between those systems, which may be scattered around a number of different institutions, you won't be able to keep the workflow moving steadily."

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 15, 2005 09:18 AM

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