The UltraLight Project: The Network as an Integrated and Managed Resource for Data-Intensive Science

  • Authors:

  • Harvey Newman;Richard Cavanaugh;Julian James Bunn;Iosif Legrand;Steven H. Low;Dan Nae;Sylvain Ravot;Conrad D. Steenberg;Xun Su;Michael Thomas;Frank van Lingen;Yang Xia;Shawn McKee

  • Affiliations:

  • California Institute of Technology;University of Florida;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;California Institute of Technology;University of Michigan

  • Venue:
  • Computing in Science and Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

We describe the NSF-funded UltraLight project. The project's goal is to meet the data-intensive computing challenges of the next generation of particle physics experiments with a comprehensive, network-focused agenda. In particular we argue that instead of treating the network traditionally, as a static, unchanging and unmanaged set of inter-computer links, we instead will use it as a dynamic, configurable, and closely monitored resource, managed end-to-end, to construct a next-generation global system able to meet the data processing, distribution, access and analysis needs of the high energy physics (HEP) community. While the initial UltraLight implementation and services architecture is being developed to serve HEP, we expect many of UltraLight's developments in the areas of networking, monitoring, management, and collaborative research, to be applicable to many fields of data intensive e-science. In this paper we give an overview of, and motivation for the UltraLight project, and provide early results within different working areas of the project.