News for and about the Internet2 community

[Lauren Rotman <>]

U.S. Large Hadron Collider ATLAS Community to Adopt perfSONAR Network  
Performance Suite

Critical Cyberinfrastructure Technology to Support High Energy Physics  
Research; NSF Grant To Accelerate U.S. Development and Adoption

New Orleans, LA – October 14, 2008 –  When the Large Hadron Collider,  
the largest global scientific experiment, officially begins operations  
in 2009, multiple terabytes of data per second will flow out of CERN  
in Europe to thousands of researchers spread across the globe. In  
addition to continuous multi-gigabit data flows between LHC sites,  
scientists will each leverage international research networks to  
download or transmit, about two terabytes of data for analysis within  
four-hour windows, every few weeks. Because of these time limitations,  
maintaining optimal network performance on the entire network path is  
absolutely critical.

For this reason, the U.S. LHC ATLAS community led by the U.S.  
Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory has committed to  
adopting the perfSONAR-PS networking performance suite of services  
among its ten participating institutions. This deployment marks the  
first major implementation of perfSONAR in the U.S. and validates its  
role in providing important cyberinfrastructure to support advanced  
scientific research. ATLAS is one of six detectors in the LHC.

“perfSONAR provides users and network engineers a window into the  
network to generate near real time performance traffic monitoring  and  
visualization,” said Brian Tierney, computer scientist, ESnet. “Its  
ability to provide global analysis of network performance problems  
across network domains makes it possible for users to instantly  
pinpoint choke points and make immediate adjustments to their  
applications to vastly enhance network performance and facilitate  
greater network reliability.”

perfSONAR is developed through a global collaboration consortium led  
by ESnet, GÉANT, Internet2, and RNP and in the U.S. via partnerships   
between the University of Delaware, ESnet, Fermi National Accelerator  
Laboratory, Internet2, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center  
(SLAC).

Understanding network performance issues has posed a number of  
challenges for distributed collaborators like those involved in the  
LHC. A typical physical path from one scientist to a remote instrument  
or collaborator requires crossing several administrative domains  
including campus, regional, and backbone networks. Each of these  
networks maintains control over who can access its diagnostic and  
performance data making the ability to isolate the faulty network  
segment, and to evaluate different solutions both challenging and time  
consuming.

perfSONAR provides the LHC community the resources necessary to  
address and resolve these issues. U.S. LHC ATLAS sites will deploy the  
new ‘Performance Node LiveCD,’ which allows organizations to  
seamlessly install a perfSONAR-enabled node with tools for monitoring  
passive network metrics and running active performance tests.  
Internet2 and ESnet are also deploying a number of hosts running  
perfSONAR services on their respective networks to help monitor LHC  
data transfers.

"The LHC represents the first major scientific endeavor that  
completely relies upon the use of advanced networks to support physics  
analysis carried out by thousands of globally distributed researchers  
who are key to the project's success. Networks enable these  
researchers to transparently utilize tens of thousands of processors  
and tens of millions of gigabytes of data storage that are provided by  
centers around the globe, resources that are seamlessly integrated by  
grid middleware such as the one developed by the Open Science Grid  
project in the U.S," said Michael Ernst, director of the RHIC and  
ATLAS computing facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Ernst added, "perfSONAR provides the comprehensive set of tools our  
community needs to efficiently diagnose and address network issues  
across the entire network path instantly. In doing so, we drastically  
reduce the administrative burdens and time constraints of manually  
troubleshooting network issues and allow our scientists to focus their  
resources on doing their science rather than worrying about the  
network."

LHC is just the first of many application communities that are  
increasingly relying upon networks to create large and physically  
distributed scientific work environments. Today, large or specialized  
machines are required to continue making basic discoveries, and  
limited funds means that instead of scattering multiple machines  
around the globe, a single machine is built with remote access in  
mind. The promise is that these scientists will find it just as easy  
to work in this globally distributed environment as they used to in  
their own lab.

Recognizing the critical role network performance plays in enabling  
this next wave of scientific collaboration and innovation, the  
National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded the University of  
Delaware in collaboration with Internet2 and the Stanford Linear  
Accelerator Center (SLAC) a grant to support the refined development  
of perfSONAR to make it more easily deployable by the U.S. research  
community like those involved in LHC. The grant also provides  
resources to enable developers to continue their participation in the  
international perfSONAR consortium as well as funds for technical  
training, documentation, and community outreach.

“perfSONAR is an important collaborative activity and represents a  
major step toward achieving interdomain end-to-end network performance  
awareness -  this comprehensive visibility has the potential to have a  
lasting impact across all networked scientific applications,” said  
Kevin Thompson, program officer for NSF's Office of  
Cyberinfrastructure. “NSF is pleased to support the contributions by  
the University of Delaware, Internet2 and SLAC in their collaborations  
with other research network organizations like ESnet and GÉANT."

Martin Swany, assistant professor of computer and information sciences  
at the University of Delaware and lead principle investigator for the  
grant, added, “Our collaborators have successfully worked together  
over the past four years to develop and begin initial deployments of  
perfSONAR. The NSF grant enables us to greatly elevate these efforts  
by providing the resources to broaden our scope of work, accelerate  
development and deployment efforts, and build strong community support  
for this important cyberinfrastructure technology.”

For more information, visit: 
http://www.internet2.edu/performance/pS-PS/index.html

Information on perfSONAR will be presented today, October 14 at 3pm  
CDT at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting Performance Update session in  
New Orleans, LA. For more information or to watch via netcast, visit:
http://events.internet2.edu/2008/fall-mm/sessionDetails.cfm?session=10000158&event=911

Media contact:
Lauren Rotman
Internet2, Public Relations Manager