November 18, 2002

NSF Award to Build National Logistical Networking Testbed

Knoxville, TN -- The National Science Foundation (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 United States for a global substrate of network storage that will facilitate large-scale experimentation with this technology by the research community.

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 France. These are private deployments not currently available to the public L-Bone infrastructure.

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 Chicago. This positioning will support high performance access from U.S. research networks, such as Abilene, and from foreign research networks as well. Future NLNT nodes are planned for the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) gigapop and other academic campuses in the US and Canada. Based on current funding the goal is to have 50TB on-line by the third year of the project, but contributed capacity from project participants could drive the level higher.

"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 contributedtheir 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 Abilene research network have been able to download CD images of popular Linux distributions from the L-Bone. Using open source tools, an L-bone download of one of these 650 MB images can be accomplished 5-7minutes, nearly ten times faster than the 40-50 minutes required by conventional methods.

The technology to be used by the NLNT will be demonstrated at both the Tennessee and the Internet2 booths at SC2002, occurring this week in Baltimore MD.

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 servedby 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 Kirkland, WA; Edmonton, AB; and Boulder, CO.

Contact:
Micah Beck
mbeck@cs.utk.edu
ph:+1.865.974.0455