OSCARS

On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System

About

Short for "On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System," OSCARS is a freely available open-source product. As developed by the Department of Energy’s high-performance science network ESnet, OSCARS was designed by network engineers who specialize in supporting the U.S. national laboratory system and its data-intensive collaborations.

OSCARS is an advanced software system for booking time and resources on high-speed science networks, which are used by large teams of researchers to share vast amounts of data. Compared with "commodity" networks, science networks must transport stunning amounts of data both quickly and flawlessly. It can take weeks or months to manually configure a network to support large scientific collaborations involving supercomputers, advanced instruments, and scientists distributed around the world. OSCARS deftly cuts through this complexity and can configure and reserve a reliable, customized set of network connections in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

In addition to science applications, OSCARS provides network operators the ability to dynamically provision backup resources should their network experience unforeseen outages.

Through its production and development phase, OSCARS has received multiple awards including the:

• 2013 R&D100 Award (see http://www.rdmag.com/award-winners/2013/07/2013-r-d-100-award-winners for more information), and
• 2011 Internet2 IDEA Award (see http://www.internet2.edu/news/detail/4894/).

OSCARS enables a number of essential functions including:

• Collaboration and data sharing. The OSCARS 0.6 release has the most extensive set of capabilities and is the most deployed software used to schedule, reserve, and provision network resources.
• Guaranteed bandwidth scheduling and provisioning of network resources. OSCARS allows users to reserve bandwidth, VLAN, and other network resources both in space and time.
• Optimal user flexibility. OSCARS is the only provisioning software that supports the notion of minimum guaranteed bandwidth. The user can exceed the bandwidth limit guarantee if there is spare unreserved capacity along the path.
• User application integration. OSCARS saves time and resources by automating the setup and teardown of virtual circuits through application integration: OSCARSʼ APIs allow other software programs to access it directly. Currently there are three software applications (two operational and one experimental) that can interoperate with OSCARS.
• Network technology agnostic. The modular design of OSCARS allows it to easily support multiple network technologies concurrently.
• Multiple network service offerings. OSCARS is designed to support multiple service offerings concurrently, resulting in a richer set of service offerings that can be advertised and utilized by the user.
• Extensive equipment vendor/platform support. OSCARS builds a very flexible system that allows easy development of capabilities to control multivendor boxes. As new devices come to market, OSCARS can be extended to support them as well.
• Support for emerging innovations, like software-defined networking (SDN). OSCARS is playing a vital role in the development of OpenFlow, a relatively new SDN protocol that allows the path of network packets through the network of switches to be determined by software running on the network routers.

More information about the OSCARS code can also be found at http://code.google.com/p/oscars-idc/.