Chin Guok

Large community of high-energy physicists share their data all around world making it necessary to ship a large number of files over wide-area networks. Regional disk caches such as the Southern California Petabyte Scale Cache have been deployed to reduce the data access latency. We observe that about 94% of the requested data volume were served from this cache, with-out remote transfers, between Sep. 2022 and July 2023. In this paper, we show the predictability of the resource utilization by exploring the trends of recent cache usage. The time series based prediction is made with a machine learning approach and the prediction errors are small relative to the variation in the input data. This work would help understanding the characteristics of the resource utilization and plan for additional deployments of caches in the future.

Large scientific collaborations often have multiple scientists accessing the same set of files while doing different analyses, which create repeated accesses to the large amounts of shared data located far away. These data accesses have long latency due to distance and occupy the limited bandwidth available over the wide-area network. To reduce the wide-area network traffic and the data access latency, regional data storage caches have been installed as a new networking service. To study the effectiveness of such a cache system in scientific applications, we examine the Southern California Petabyte Scale Cache for a high-energy physics experiment. By examining about 3TB of operational logs, we show that this cache removed 67.6% of file requests from the wide-area network and reduced the traffic volume on wide-area network by 12.3TB (or 35.4%) an average day. The reduction in the traffic volume (35.4%) is less than the reduction in file counts (67.6%) because the larger files are less likely to be reused. Due to this difference in data access patterns, the cache system has implemented a policy to avoid evicting smaller files when processing larger files. We also build a machine learning model to study the predictability of the cache behavior. Tests show that this model is able to accurately predict the cache accesses, cache misses, and network throughput, making the model useful for future studies on resource provisioning and planning.

The Software-defined network for End-to-end Networked Science at Exascale (SENSE) research project is building smart network services to accelerate scientific discovery in the era of ‘big data’ driven by Exascale, cloud computing, machine learning and AI. The project’s architecture, models, and demonstrated prototype define the mechanisms needed to dynamically build end-to-end virtual guaranteed networks across administrative domains, with no manual intervention. In addition, a highly intuitive ‘intent’ based interface, as defined by the project, allows applications to express their high-level service requirements, and an intelligent, scalable model-based software orchestrator converts that intent into appropriate network services, configured across multiple types of devices. The significance of these capabilities is the ability for science applications to manage the network as a firstclass schedulable resource akin to instruments, compute, and storage, to enable well defined and highly tuned complex workflows that require close coupling of resources spread across a vast geographic footprint such as those used in science domains like high-energy physics and basic energy sciences.

Wide area networks (WAN) forward traffic through a mix of packet and optical data planes, composed by a variety of devices from different vendors. Multiple forwarding technologies and encapsulation methods are used for each data plane (e.g. IP, MPLS, ATM, SONET, Wavelength Switching). Despite standards defined, the control planes of these devices are usually not interoperable, and different technologies are used to manage each forwarding segment independently (e.g. OpenFlow, TL-1, GMPLS). The result is lack of coordination between layers and inefficient resource usage. In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of a system that uses unmodified OpenFlow to optimize network utilization across layers, enabling practical bandwidth virtualization. We discuss strategies for scalable traffic monitoring and to minimize losses on route updates across layers. We explore two use cases that benefit from multi-layer bandwidth on demand provisioning. A prototype of the system was built open using a traditional circuit reservation application and an unmodified SDN controller, and its evaluation was per-formed on a multi-vendor testbed.

http://blog.infinera.com/2014/09/05/henrique-rodrigues-wins-best-student-paper-at-ieee-hot-interconnects-for-infinerabrocadeesnet-multi-layer-sdn-demo/

http://esnetupdates.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/esnet-student-assistant-henrique-rodrigues-wins-best-student-paper-award-at-hot-interconnects/