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Title: Software-defined network for end-to-end networked science at the exascale

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1670785· OSTI ID:1670785
 [1];  [1];  [1];  [1];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6]
  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
  2. California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
  3. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
  4. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
  5. Virnao, LLC, Arlington, VA (United States)
  6. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)

Domain science applications and workflow processes are currently forced to view the network as an opaque infrastructure into which they inject data and hope that it emerges at the destination with an acceptable Quality of Experience. There is little ability for applications to interact with the network to exchange information, negotiate performance parameters, discover expected performance metrics, or receive status/troubleshooting information in real time. The work presented here is motivated by a vision for a new smart network and smart application ecosystem that will provide a more deterministic and interactive environment for domain science workflows. The Software-Defined Network for End-to-end Networked Science at Exascale (SENSE) system includes a model-based architecture, implementation, and deployment which enables automated end- to-end network service instantiation across administrative domains. An intent based interface allows applications to express their high-level service requirements, an intelligent orchestrator and resource control systems allow for custom tailoring of scalability and real-time responsiveness based on individual application and infrastructure operator requirements. This allows the science applications to manage the network as a first-class schedulable resource as is the current practice for instruments, compute, and storage systems. Deployment and experiments on production networks and testbeds have validated SENSE functions and performance. Emulation based testing verified the scalability needed to support research and education infrastructures. Key contributions of this work include an architecture definition, reference implementation, and deployment. This provides the basis for further innovation of smart network services to accelerate scientific discovery in the era of big data, cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Research Organization:
California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC)
DOE Contract Number:
SC0015528
OSTI ID:
1670785
Report Number(s):
DOE-Caltech-15528-1; TRN: US2204319
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English