Providing Quality of Service Networking to High Performance GRID Applications

This paper reports on QoS experiments and demonstrations done in the MB-NG and DataTAG EU projects. These are leading edge network research projects involving more that 50 researchers in the UK, Europe and North America, concerned with the development and testing of protocols and standards for the next generation of high speed networks. We implemented and tested the Differentiated Services Architecture (DiffServ) in a multidomain, 2.5 Gbits/s network (the first such deployment) defining appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to be used between administrative domains to guarantee end-to-end Quality of Service. We also investigated the behaviour of DiffServ on High Bandwidth, high delay development networks connecting Europe and North America using a variety of manufacturer’s equipment. These quality of service tests also included innovative MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) experiments to establish guaranteed bandwidth connections to GRID applications in a fast and efficient way. We finally report on experiences delivering quality of Service networking to high performance applications like Particle Physics data transfer and High Performance Computation. This included implementation and development of middleware incorporated in the Globus toolkit that enables these applications to easily use these network services. I