The EGEE project officially ended on the 31 March 2006
EGEE II started on 1 April 2006 and the new EGEE website can be found at:
http://www.eu-egee.org
JRA4 - NETWORK SERVICES DEVELOPMENT
The Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe (EGEE) project aims to provide a production-quality infrastructure integrating a large number of software components provided by different, geographically distributed organisations. The fifth framework Grid projects, notably DataGrid, have defined and deployed the latest generation of Grid software. Building on this work and the experience acquired, EGEE will provide to the Grid applications an environment based on production quality software and facilities available around the clock. The highest priority will be to deliver a system with high quality characteristics so a programme of quality assurance is a crucial part of EGEE.
The Network Services Development activity includes two tasks - resource allocation/reservation and network performance monitoring, which have a network-specific dimension.
These tasks are aimed at the evolution of research-level techniques into production-level Grid services, requiring development of what is currently available and implementation of appropriate interfaces, followed by deployment across the network domains of the GEANT/NREN network.
Interfaces will be constructed permitting Grid middleware to access service levels and bandwidth reservation via the control plane of the network, in order to create the connections and flows by Grid applications through the dynamic reconfiguration of the network.
Tools will be developed to measure network characteristics thus allowing network performance to act as an input into the way Grid middleware organises and allocates resources to perform a Grid job.
The objectives of the Network Services Development team include:
- To develop interfaces to the network control plane to allow Grid middleware to make immediate and advance reservations of network connectivity specified in terms of bandwidth, duration and quality of service.
- To develop services that provide access to standardised network performance characteristics, and to compose higher-level services that provide end-to-end measurements of the network for the purposes of application performance determination, fault identification and diagnosis, resource allocation and Service Level Agreements (SLA) adherence monitoring.
- To study the benefits and availability of IPv6 in the context of the EGEE Grid.