***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***
Contact: Micah Beck,
mbeck@cs.utk.edu, (865) 974 0455
*** NSF Award to Build
National Logistical Networking Testbed ***
(NSF) has awarded $900,000
dollars to a group of Computer Scientists, led by Micah Beck at the University of Tennessee (UT), to provision a wide area testbed for experiments in Logistical Networking.
Logistical Networking is a radically new approach to communications
infrastructure that aims to integrate data transmission and data storage in
much the same way that military and industrial logistics integrates
transportation lines and warehouses to form a unified system. To achieve this
goal it employs a novel storage technology that allows these resources to be
combined in a more flexible and scalable way than traditional approaches
usually allow. With additional equipment from storage vendor and project
collaborator YottaYotta, the National Logistical
Networking Testbed (NLNT) will lay the foundation in
the
The key innovation involved
is called the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP), which provides the mechanism
for sharing the storage resources of the "storage depots" that will
populate the NLNT. The design of IBP is
modeled directly on the Internet Protocol, the datagram delivery service that
underlies the Internet. It provides a
primitive form of network storage that implements the most common functions
needed to make storage usable, but gives only “best effort” service guarantees
wherever possible in order to maximize scalability. Most notably, IBP’s normal mode of allocation
is time limited, using flexible policies to enforce time-sharing of the disk or
memory resources that the depots contain.
“IBP does for storage
essentially what packet networking does for transmission bandwidth,” explains
Beck. “It makes it possible to share writable storage in a much more scalable
way. But applying the Internet model also means that if you want services with
stronger properties, you have to have to build them end-to-end on top of IBP.”
To address this challenge Dr. Beck is working with Dr. James S. Plank and the
researchers they direct at UT’s Logistical Computing and Internetworking
(LoCI)
Laboratory to develop a network storage stack, analogous to the Internet stack, that supports some important higher-level services.
This work will provide software base for the NLNT.
New NLNT depots will be
added to a test deployment of this technology that already exists called the
Logistical Backbone, or L-Bone. The L-Bone is currently serving more than 5 TB
of sharable network storage from IBP depots at more than 60 locations
worldwide. Initially the L-Bone used the
resources of the NSF-funded Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure
(I2-DSI) project, which Dr. Beck heads, as well as resources by project
collaborators at various academic institutions. A very large group of new
storage depots on L-Bone comes from PlanetLab, a
global testbed for developing and accessing new
network services, supported by Intel Research and involving a worldwide
collaboration of Computer Scientists. Depots are also being deployed within the
DOE National Laboratories in support of the Scientific Discovery through
Advanced Computation program and within the e-Toile active and logistical
networking infrastructure in
The first new NLNT depot
will be a 4.7TB NetStorager System from YottaYotta, which will increase the size of the current
L-Bone by over 50%. It will be located at StarLight,
the international high-speed optical fiber connection point in
"We’ve seen a lot of
interest from the community," said Dr. Plank, who is a primary
investigator on the NLNT project. "Several groups have contributed their
own storage to the L-Bone and we expect participation to continue to grow with
the expansion of the NLNT."
The NLNT will support a wide
variety of applications, including movement of massive scientific data sets,
distributed data mining, distributed visualization, video delivery, and
advanced forms of content distribution. Grid computing is also a major
application area. Along with Beck and Plank, the other investigators on the
project – Drs. Jack Dongarra at UT Knoxville, Miron Livny at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, and Rich Wolski at the University
of California at Santa Barbara – have been strong participants in the grid
computing movement from its inception.
The research community may
also see immediate practical benefits. Since July of 2002, for example, Linux
users on campuses connected to the
The technology to be used by
the NLNT will be demonstrated at both the
The Logistical Computing and
Internetworking (LoCI) Laboratory of the Computer
Science Department of the University of Tennessee is devoted to research on
information logistics for distributed computer systems and networks.
Information logistics studies architectures and strategies for the flexible coscheduling of the physical resources that underpin
computer systems: storage, computation, and data transmission. Formed in 2001
with support from UT’s Center for Information Technology Research, LoCI Lab has pioneered in the application of the Internet
model of scalable resource sharing to physical storage, creating a unified
communication infrastructure that can support advanced applications not
adequately served by the conventional model of Internetworking. Its work is
funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of
Energy.
YottaYotta’s NetStorager
System, a next generation storage solution, converges storage and
communications technologies to enable globally networked, coherent storage. The
YottaYotta distributed system architecture delivers
continuous information access, while providing unprecedented levels of data
protection. Operated and managed as a single entity, the NetStorager
System improves operational costs and maximizes resource utilization through
sharable infrastructure. YottaYotta’s business
solution enables the creation of differentiated value added services that can
be managed, delivered and tracked on a subscriber basis. Founded in January
2000,YottaYotta is privately funded with offices in
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