Shape-shifting Elephants: Multi-modal Transport for Integrated Research Infrastructure
- Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
Data Acquisition (DAQ) workloads form an important class of scientific network traffic that by its nature (1) flows across different research infrastructure, including remote instruments and supercomputer clusters, (2) has ever-increasing throughput demands, and (3) has ever-increasing integration demands---for example, observations at one instrument could trigger a reconfiguration of another instrument. Today's DAQ transfers rely on UDP and (heavily tuned) TCP, but this is driven by convenience rather than suitability. The mismatch between Internet transport protocols and scientific workloads becomes more stark with the steady increase in link capacities, data generation, and integration across research infrastructure. This position paper argues the importance of developing specialized transport protocols for DAQ workloads. It proposes a new transport feature for this kind of elephant flow: multi-modality involves the network actively configuring the transport protocol to change how DAQ flows are processed across different underlying networks that connect scientific research infrastructure. Multi-modality is a layering violation that is proposed as a pragmatic technique for DAQ transport protocol design. It takes advantage of programmable network hardware that is increasingly being deployed in scientific research infrastructure. The paper presents an initial evaluation through a pilot study that includes a Tofino2 switch and Alveo FPGA cards, and using data from a particle detector.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359
- OSTI ID:
- 2478267
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-PUB-24-0743-CSAID; oai:inspirehep.net:2849800; ISBN: 979-8-4007-1272-2
- Journal Information:
- Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, Journal Name: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
- Publisher:
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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