Gigabit Testbeds Final Report

The Gigabit Testbed Initiative Final Report December 1996 This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Re- search Projects Agency under Cooperative Agreement NCR8919038 with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1 Table of Contents Executive Summary........................................................................................................................ 3 The Gigabit Testbeds .................................................................................................................. 3 Initiative Impacts ........................................................................................................................ 4 Future Directions ........................................................................................................................ 6 Investigations and Findings ........................................................................................................ 8 1 Introduction................................................................................................................................ 13 2 The Starting Point ...................................................................................................................... 15 2.1 A Brief History ................................................................................................................... 15 2.2 State of Very High-Speed Networking in 1989-90............................................................. 16 2.3 Gigabit Networking Research Issues.................................................................................. 17 3 Structure and Goals.................................................................................................................... 24 3.1 Initiative Formation ............................................................................................................ 24 3.2 Initiative Management ........................................................................................................ 24 3.3 The Testbeds ....................................................................................................................... 25 4 Investigations and Findings ....................................................................................................... 33 4.1 Transmission....................................................................................................................... 35 4.2 Switching ............................................................................................................................ 46 4.3 Interworking........................................................................................................................ 51 4.4 Host I/O............................................................................................................................... 58 4.5 Network Management......................................................................................................... 73 4.6 Applications and Support Tools.......................................................................................... 80 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 101 5.1 Testbed Results and Technology Trends .......................................................................... 102 5.2 Host I/O............................................................................................................................. 103 5.3 Striping.............................................................................................................................. 103 5.4 Switching .......................................................................................................................... 104 5.5 Network Protocols and Algorithms .................................................................................. 104 5.6 Future Research Infrastructure.......................................................................................... 105 References................................................................................................................................... 107 Appendix A: Publications and Reports....................................................................................... 108 2 Executive Summary The Gigabit Testbed Initiative was a major effort by approximately forty organizations represent- ing universities, telecommunication carriers, industry and national laboratories, and computer companies to create a set of very high-speed network testbeds and to explore their application to scientific research. This effort, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the De- fense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was coordinated and led by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) working closely with each of the many participating organizations and with the U.S. Government. The U. S. Government was also a participating organization insofar as testbeds were established within several Government laboratories to explore the concepts and technologies emerging from the Initiative. Five Testbeds, named Aurora, Blanca, Casa, Nectar and Vistanet, were established and used over a period of several years to explore advanced networking issues, to investigate architectural al- ternatives for gigabit networks, and to carry out a wide range of experimental applications in areas such as weather modeling, chemical dynamics, radiation oncology, and geophysics data exploration. The five testbeds were geographically distributed across the United States as shown in the figure below. The Gigabit Testbeds At the time the project started in 1990 there were significant barriers to achieving high performance networking, which was falling significantly behind advances in high performance computing. One of the major barriers was the absence of wide-area transmission facilities which could support gigabit research, and the lack of marketplace motivation for carriers to provide 3 such facilities. The testbed initiative specifically targeted this problem through the creation of a multi-dimensional research project involving carriers, applications researchers, and network technologists. A second (and related) barrier was the lack of commercially available high speed network equipment operating at rates of 622 Mbps or higher. Fortunately, several companies were beginning to develop such equipment and the testbed initiative helped to accelerate its de- ployment. A key decision in the effort, therefore, was to make use of experimental technologies that were appropriate for gigabit networking. The emphasis was placed on fundamental systems issues involved with the development of a technology base for gigabit networking rather than on test and evaluation of individual technologies. ATM, SONET and HIPPI were three of the technologies used in the program. As a result, the impetus for industry to get these technologies to market was greatly heightened. Many of the networks that subsequently emerged, such as the NSF-sponsored vBNS and the DOD-sponsored DREN, can be attributed to the success of the gigabit testbed program. The U.S. Government funded this effort with a total of approximately $20M over a period of approximately five years, with these funds used by CNRI primarily to fund university research efforts. Major contributions of transmission facilities and equipment were donated at no cost to the project by the carriers and computer companies, who also directly funded participating researchers in some cases. The total value of industry contributions to the effort was estimated to be perhaps 10 or 20 times greater than the Government funding. The coordinating role of a lead organization, played by CNRI, was essential in helping to bridge the many gaps between the individual research projects, industry, government agencies and potential user communities. At the time this effort began, there did not appear to be a clearly visible path to make this kind of progress happen. Initiative Impacts In addition to the many technical contributions resulting from the testbeds, a number of non- technical results have had major impacts for both education and industry. First and foremost was a new model for network research provided by the testbed initiative. The bringing together of network and application researchers, integration of the computer science and telecommunications communities, academia-industry-government research teams, and government-leveraged industry funding, all part of a single, orchestrated project spanning the country, provided a new level of research collaboration not previously seen in this field. The Initiative created a community of high performance networking researchers that crossed aca- demic/industry/government boundaries. The coupling of application and networking technology research from project inception was a major step forward for both new technology development and applications progress. Having applications researchers involved from the start of the project allowed networking researchers to obtain early feedback on their network designs from a user’s perspective, and allowed network performance to be evaluated using actual user traffic. Similarly, application researchers learned 4 how network performance impacted their distributed application designs through early deploy- ment of prototype software. Perhaps most significantly, researchers could directly investigate networked

Load more