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University of Illinois at Chicago Researchers Developing Networking Techniques for Scientists to Accelerate Data over Hybrid Networks

March 21, 2006

Chicago - As a number of large-scale, multinational experiments prepare to go online in the next 2-3 years, a new generation of data retrieval and transmission techniques and tools will be required. The data yielded by these experiments will be prolific, and a diverse, globally distributed community of scientists will be eager to acquire and explore this data.

Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) are working to give application scientists “user-friendly” options for transferring large datasets over wide-area networks; one such research effort focuses on the development of specialized application-level transport protocols.

Today, most research and education networks are shared, and operate as “best effort”, with multiple routers, data paths and dynamic packet reassignment decisions that provide an equitable sharing among many users of bandwidth, but a less-than-optimal handling of cluster-computer-initiated data flows in the multi-hundred-megabit and multi- gigabit range. The current cost of routers makes it prohibitive to permanently optimize and dedicate a routed network infrastructure among specific sites that have large bursts of traffic, but are not utilizing the full bandwidth continuously. An alternative networking model, one which relies upon less costly switches, can be dedicated, and as such provide applications with known and knowable characteristics, such as guaranteed bandwidth (for data movement), guaranteed latency (for visualization, collaboration and data analysis) and guaranteed scheduling (for remote instruments).

EVL is conducting application-level protocol research so applications can maximally exploit the available bandwidth, whether a network is routed, switched or both (hybrid). A “fairness factor” is being designed into this new generation of protocols to avoid forcing the data through and interfering with existing traffic. “For the past five years, we have been designing specialized transport protocols for data-intensive interactive visualization and streaming media applications, where low latency and high reliability are of utmost importance,” said EVL co-director Jason Leigh.

This January, EVL researchers began testing whether data-intensive science can effectively use hybrid networks to move large files effectively using its specialized, application-level, UDP transport protocol called LambdaStream.

EVL ran cluster-to-cluster file-transfer tests to determine whether the same network performance obtained over Layer-2 (switched) networks could be obtained with dedicated 10Gbps paths on Layer-3 (routed) networks using LambdaStream. The tests specifically compared throughput over a TeraGrid 10Gbps SONET-routed network using MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) between Chicago and San Diego, and CAVEwave, a 10Gbps switched LAN PHY network between the same locations.

The file-transfer programs invoked LambdaStream to send multiple 1Gbps data streams over each of these networks to saturate the 10Gbps links for 30-60 minute intervals. The dataset used was a 1-foot- resolution map of 5,000 square miles of the city of Chicago provided by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS). The map consists of 3,000 files of tiled images that are 75MBytes each, for a total of 220GBytes of information.

EVL performed three different LambdaStream tests over the TeraGrid and CAVEwave networks: moving data from memory to memory, from disk to memory, and from disk to disk; the three ways scientists typically use networks to access data. The measured performance across CAVEwave and TeraGrid was comparable, proving that a routed and non-routed infrastructure could both sustain near 10Gbps and behave the same when a specialized protocol is used.

The January tests also affirmed that a switched, end-to-end dedicated wavelength is a reliable alternative to shared networks when transferring high-throughput scientific application data.

As partners in the National Science Foundation’s OptIPuter project, EVL and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are proving it is economical to have point-to-point connections once you have the right endpoint technologies in place. “We are propagating a scalable, economical networking solution that puts high-performance networking resources into the control of individual scientists,” said Tom DeFanti, EVL co-director and OptIPuter program co-PI. “Lambda services offer scientists a networking means to solve problems that are cost prohibitive to do any other way.”

EVL is one of a few laboratories in the United States today that has access to its own persistent transcontinental 10GE optical connection, called the CAVEwave, on the National LambdaRail (NLR). CAVEwave extends from the StarLight optical Internet exchange in downtown Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Seattle, to the UCSD campus. This link allows scientists at both ends to test experimental protocols and tools, and supports high-end networked application demonstrations.

LAMBDASTREAM EXPERIMENT DETAILS

A 30-node cluster at EVL connects to an in-house switch that aggregates traffic and sends it to a Force10 optical switch at StarLight. At UCSD, campus fibers connect the CAVEwave to a 28-node cluster in the Calit2 building. This configuration enables research among Chicago, San Diego, the University of Washington, and international colleagues who connect to the PNWGP via Pacific Wave on the U.S. west coast, or to StarLight in Chicago.

The StarLight Force10 switch that connects EVL to the CAVEwave also connects to the TeraGrid Juniper T640 router located at StarLight. The TeraGrid connects Chicago to Los Angeles to the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD where, for this test, it was directly connected to the same OptIPuter cluster at Calit2. Since their physical fiber routes are not the same, the CAVEwave, going through Seattle, has an average round-trip-time (RTT) of 78.3ms, and the TeraGrid, a more direct path, has an average RTT of 56.2ms.

MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) was used to monitor traffic through StarLight’s Force10 switch, and a similar traffic utilization tool called Cricket was used to monitor traffic through the TeraGrid’s Juniper T640 router at StarLight. To determine the maximum performance, researchers first used the iperf bandwidth measurement tool to send the same data using the unreliable UDP protocol.

Using iperf, the maximum throughput achieved over the switched 10GE (10Gbps) CAVEwave network was 9.75Gbps, and the maximum throughput over the routed OC-192 (9.6Gbps) TeraGrid was 9.45Gbps. Using LambdaStream, CAVEwave achieved speeds of 9.23Gbps reliable memory-to- memory, 9.21Gbps reliable disk-to-memory, and 9.30Gbps reliable disk- to-disk transfers; and, TeraGrid achieved speeds of 9.16Gbps reliable memory-to-memory, 9.15Gbps reliable disk-to-memory, and 9.22Gbps reliable disk-to-disk transfers. Bidirectionally, CAVEwave achieved 18.19Gbps and TeraWave achieved 18.06Gbps doing reliable memory-to- memory transfers.

The MRTG-measured bandwidth speeds were verified by LambdaStream, which is instrumented to monitor the amount of information it sends and receives. Moreover, whereas MRTG measurements are five-minute averages, LambdaStream measurements are continuous, and therefore more accurate. For several years now, EVL has been designing application-level protocols and instrumenting them for the user’s awareness so scientists can have easy access to measurement of their own traffic. These protocols have been used over routed and switched networks but are particularly necessary when using Layer-1 optical switches, as bandwidth utilization cannot be measured any other way.

It should be noted that these tests relied on the availability of TeraGrid routers with OC-192 ports, which are an order of magnitude more expensive than 10GE ports on switches, not an issue if the routers already are in place, as in this case, but important to note for future network implementations to serve high-performance data transfer. These tests were performed on transcontinental networks; EVL researchers believe that similar results would be achieved using hybrid transoceanic networks as well.

About LambdaStream
LambdaStream, developed by EVL, is an application-level data transport protocol that supports high-bandwidth multi-gigabit streaming for network-intensive applications, especially those that require reliability at high bandwidth and with low jitter. LambdaStream’s key characteristics include loss recovery and unique adaptive rate control and configurability as both a reliable and unreliable transport protocol. LambdaStream is also instrumented, meaning that it keeps track of the amount of data it is sending and the rate at which it is being sent. For the experiment described here, LambdaStream was configured as a reliable UDP-based protocol.

An “application-level” protocol enables users to select and modify available protocols. Systems are capable of sending data with TCP or UDP protocols, but typically special sys-admin privileges or machine modifications are necessary to change and/or optimize them when sending large datasets over high-performance networks. LambdaStream enables the user, or application, to achieve high throughput over high-speed networks by building on top of existing TCP and UDP protocols without any machine modification or special sys-admin privileges. LambdaStream is based on EVL’s first transport protocol called Reliable Blast UDP (RBUDP), developed in 2001, which started the trend towards using alternative protocols for high-speed data transport. LambdaStream is a version of the protocol intended for low- latency, real-time, reliable data streaming.

About the OptIPuter, www.optiputer.net
The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5-million project funded by the National Science Foundation. It will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected via optical networks. University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) lead the research team, with academic partners at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, University of Southern California / Information Sciences Institute, University of California Irvine, Texas A&M University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign / National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Michigan and Purdue University; affiliate partners at the U.S. Geological Survey EROS, NASA, University of Amsterdam and SARA Computing and Network Services in the Netherlands, CANARIE in Canada, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) in Korea, and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan; and, industrial partners Big Bangwidth, Calient Networks, Chiaro Networks, Cisco, Glimmerglass Networks, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Rincon Research, Sun Microsystems and Telcordia Technologies.

About EVL, www.evl.uic.edu
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago is a graduate research laboratory specializing in the design and development of high-resolution visualization and virtual-reality display systems, collaboration software for use on multi-gigabit networks, and advanced networking infrastructure. EVL is a joint effort of UIC’s College of Engineering and School of Art and Design, and represents the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country offering graduate MS, PhD and MFA degrees. EVL has received worldwide recognition for developing the original CAVE® and ImmersaDesk® virtual reality systems; and most recently the 105-Megapixel LambdaVision tiled display and Varrier autostereoscopic display. EVL is a founding member of StarLight and the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), and with UCSD is a leading institution working on the NSF-funded OptIPuter project.

About CAVEwave
The University of Illinois at Chicago has a persistent 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) connection to the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California in San Diego via its own private wavelength on the National LambdaRail (NLR) infrastructure. Called “CAVEwave™,” this link is dedicated to networking research and development. The CAVEwave is also available to transport experimental traffic between Federal agencies, international research centers, and corporate research projects that bring 1-10 GE wavelengths to Chicago, Seattle, and San Diego. The CAVEwave can be used to prototype and measure applications that can be moved to production later on, mitigating the risk of early adoption by mission critical users. The CAVE® is EVL’s virtual reality room invention; the CAVE was successfully licensed for commercialization. The CAVEwave is so named because funds derived from this licensing were spent to procure the 10GE wavelength. CAVE and CAVEwave are trademarks of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

About TeraGrid, www.teragrid.org
The TeraGrid is an open and extensible partnership of researchers, computational experts, and resource providers that together provide a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure to enable discovery in science and engineering. TeraGrid and its science gateways, education, and mentoring programs connect and broaden scientific communities. NSF established the TeraGrid resources and their integration as part of a Major Research Equipment construction project from 2001 to 2004. In August 2005, NSF extended its support for the TeraGrid with a set of awards for operation, user support and enhancement of the TeraGrid facility to provide an integrative cyberinfrastructure over the next five years. Eight Resource Provider partners were funded along with an award to the University of Chicago to coordinate and integrate TeraGrid via the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG). The Resource Providers include Argonne National Laboratory, Indiana University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Contact: Laura Wolf, EVL / UIC, (312) 996-3002; laura @ evl.uic.edu