Towards Managed Terabit/s Scientific Data Flows

Abstract

Scientific collaborations on a global scale, such as the LHC experiments at CERN [1], rely today on the presence of high performance, high availability networks. In this paper we review the developments performed over the last several years on high throughput applications, multilayer software-defined network path provisioning, path selection and load balancing methods, and the integration of these methods with the mainstream data transfer and management applications of CMS [2], one of the major LHC experiments. These developments are folded into a compact system capable of moving data among research sites at the 1 Terabit per second scale. Several aspects that went into the design and target different components of the system are presented, including: evaluation of the 40 and 100Gbps capable hardware on both network and server side, data movement applications, flow management and the network-application interface leveraging advanced network services. We report on comparative results between several multi-path algorithms, the performance increase obtained using this approach, and present results from the related SC'13 demonstration.

Additional details