ESnet’s Brian Tierney, Jason Zurawski Co-Edit Journal Section on Network Measurement, Monitoring

In the November issue of IEEE Communications, ESnet’s Brian Tierney and Jason Zurawski served as co-editors (with four others) of a special section on network measurement and monitoring. According to the authors, writing in a guest editorial, even though more and more services (including the cloud) are increasingly important for both the scientific and corporate worlds, network performance has not kept up. And the network problems are becoming more subtle and detrimental, while also being more challenging to troubleshoot across domains. Addressing the problem requires both sophisticated measurement and monitoring tools that are interoperable and also meet policy requirements.

To examine novel approaches and standardization efforts, the team of guest editors solicited research papers and received 18 submissions, of which eight were selected for publication in two issues of IEEE Communications, with four appearing in the November 2013 issue and four in May 2014. In addition to Tierney and Zurawski, the editors were Prasad Calyam, University of Missouri—Columbia; Constantine Dovrolis, Georgia Tech; Loki Joergenson, Lionsgate Technologies; and Raj Kettimuthu, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago.

Access to the research papers is limited to IEEE members and subscribers.

ESnet's Jason Zurawski and Brian Tierney
ESnet’s Jason Zurawski and Brian Tierney

ESnet Co-Leads Washington Workshop on Developing Prototype SDN Network

About 100 networking experts from academia, industry, national labs and federal agencies met for a two-day workshop at the National Science foundation to plan a path forward to develop, deploy and operate a prototype SDN network. SDN, or Software Defined Networking, is an upcoming technology paradigm aimed at making it easier for software applications to automatically configure and control the various layers of the network to improve flexibility, predictability and reliability.

ESnet Chief Technologist Inder Monga was the lead organizer of the workshop and ESnet network engineer Erich Pouyoul gave a talk on science drivers for SDN. Monga also led a breakout session on “Technology and Operational Gap Analysis.” ESnet has been a pioneer in developing and deploying SDN technology in support of data-intensive science for almost a decade, starting with research on virtual network circuits that eventually culminated in the facility’s OSCARS project, recipient of a 2013 R&D100 award.

The invitation-only workshop was held at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., and included speakers from the White House Office on Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Google, DARPA, Internet2, SRI and Brocade, as well as ESnet. Among the areas covered were transparency and interoperation among SDN domains, security and identity management, and the participation of equipment vendors to advance technology transfer.

The workshop was organized after the OSTP directed federal agencies participating in the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Subcommittee’s Large Scale Networking (LSN) Coordinating Group to plan and hold an LSN workshop. The goal was to have participation by representatives from federal agencies, the commercial sector, researchers, and other networking and distributed systems research community participants to explore and report on the need for a prototype SDN network.

The workshop participants will draft a report documenting recommendations for needed R&D, resources and collaboration to deploy and operate the prototype SDN network and to identify future SDN research needs.

On the eve of the workshop, Federal Computer Week magazine published an article about federal agencies looking into SDN. Monga was among the sources interviewed for the article, which describes SDN as the next major architectural change looming for the IT community.

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  ESnet Chief Technologist Inder Monga

ESnet’s Michael Bennett Recognized by IEEE for Work in Energy Efficiency Standards

Michael Bennett, head of ESnet’s Network Engineering Group, has been awarded an IEEE-SA Standards Medallion for his work in helping to create energy-saving standards for devices with Ethernet connections. The standards are expected to help save terawatts of otherwise-wasted electricity by automatically switching networked components to energy-saving modes when not in use. The award was presented by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) at its annual awards ceremony on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2013.Bennett was recognized for his role as chair of the IEEE 802.3az Energy-Efficient Ethernet Task Force and for his contributions promoting the adoption of energy-efficiency techniques in Ethernet projects after 802.3az. Read more.

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        ESnet’s Michael Bennett