Network Services for High Performance Distributed Computing and Data Management

Much of modern science is dependent on high performance distributed computing and data handling. This distributed infrastructure, in turn, depends on high performance operation of high speed networks and services – especially when the science infrastructure is widely distributed geographically. This is true for small science groups in fields such as materials, nanotechnology, molecular biology and genomics, etc., that involve remote instruments and/or large amounts of data, as well as for the obvious cases of the large science collaborations in fields such as high energy physics, astronomy and cosmology, large-scale computational science, etc. In all of these cases sophisticated and highly tuned network services are needed to enable the science because the science is dependent on high throughput so that the distributed computing and data management systems will be able to analyze data as quickly as instruments produce it. Two network services have emerged as essential for supporting high performance distributed applications: Guaranteed bandwidth and multi-domain monitoring. Guaranteed bandwidth service – typically supplied as a virtual circuit