UltraLight is a collaboration of experimental physicists and network engineers whose
purpose is to provide the network advances required to enable and facilitate
petabyte-scale analysis of globally distributed data. Existing Grid-based
infrastructures provide massive computing and storage resources, but are currently
limited by their treatment of the network as an external, passive, and largely
unmanaged resource. This paper will give an overview of the recent advances made
within the UltraLight collaboration over the last 3 years within the different work
areas of the project which include: the UltraLight testbed, transportation layer
(FAST TCP and MAX net), transfer applications (FDT), network aware command and
control systems (VINCI), network centric storage clouds (LStore), and physics
applications (data streaming and distributed analysis). Several of the technologies
developed within the UltraLight project are currently being deployed and field tested
to support efficient transfer of data and prepare for LHC startup. The core of the
tools rely on globally distributed publish and subscribe infrastructures and
end-to-end monitoring, to prevent single points of failure, increase robustness and
improve scalability.
Supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science