THE TERAGRID PROJECT

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THE TERAGRID PROJECT

• WHAT IS THE TERAGRID?
• TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to build and
  deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive,
  distributed infrastructure for open scientific
  research.

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WHO STARTED THE TERAGRID PROJECT

• The TeraGrid project was launched by the National
  Science Foundation in August 2001 with 53
  million in funding to four sites
• These were the NCSA at the UIUC, the SDSC at the
  UCSD, Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL,
  and Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR)
  at the California Institute of Technology in
  Pasadena.

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TERAGRID PROJECT FUNCTIONALITY

• The TeraGrid is a high performance network of
  supercomputers
• It is designed to allow RD of applications that
  require nearly a trillion bytes of computational
  power

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A MAJOR TERAGRID CHALLENGE

• Although the network can transfer billions of
  bytes of info, most applications cant utilize
  the benefits
• This is because data loss occurring at the
  network or system level hampers performance

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OUR RESEARCH PROBLEM

• It is believed that if one could differentiate
  between data lost at the system and network
  level, the system could be better utilized
• As of now, TCP detects all data loss as network
  losses and takes aggressive action on the
  TeraGrid network. UDP either has no congestion
  control mechanisms or works the same way as TCP.
• Our goal is to give directives to the network
  protocol in the Grid to take actions only when
  results would be effective.

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OUR RESEARCH METHOD

• The approach we are pursuing is to analyze what
  we term packet-loss signatures
• In this method, a binary string of
  acknowledgements (11001100011 etc-) is taken and
  analyzed
• The concept of Topological Entropy is used to
  discover signature patterns and predictability
• One would expect to differentiate in patterns
  when it came to network data or system data.

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RESEARCH PLANS AND RESULTS

• Umaine Professor Dr Phillip.M.Dickens has so far
  produced encouraging results on the Teragrid.
• We will conduct further experiments to test
  whether this idea can be applicable in a larger
  class of network systems.
• This will be done by setting up a network on
  campus that will simulate the and collect packet
  loss data signatures.

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THANK YOU