The UltraLight Project: The Network as an Integrated and Managed Resource in Grid Systems for High Energy Physics and Data Intensive Science

In: Computing in Science and Engineering, Grid Computing issue.

Harvey Newman, Julian Bunn, Richard Cavanaugh, Iosif Legrand, Steven Low, Shawn McKee, Dan Nae, Sylvan Ravot, Conrad Steenberg, Xun Su, Michael Thomas, Frank van Lingen and Yang Xia (2005) 

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. his work is partly supported by the Department of Energy grants: DE-FC02-01ER25459, DE-FG03-92-ER40701, DE-AC02-76CH03000 as part of the Particle Physics DataGrid project, DE-FG02-04ER-25613 as part of Lambda Station, and by the National Science Foundation grants: ANI-0230967, PHY-0218937, PHY-0122557, PHY-0427110, ANI-0113425, ANI-0230967, EIA-0303620, by the ARO grants: DAAD19-02-1-0283, F49620-03-1-0119 and the AFOSR grants: F49620-03-1-0119.