GLIF Techs say 'aloha' to new task forces

[Kevin Meynell <meynell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

GLIF Techs say 'aloha' to new task forces

6 February 2007 -- The GLIF Technical and Control Plane Working 
Groups held meetings on 19-20 January February 2007 in conjunction 
with the Internet2/ESCC Joint Techs Workshop and APAN 25 in Honolulu, 
Hawaii, USA. This involved forty-five participants from the 
Asia-Pacific region, Europe, North America and Latin America who 
generated much topical discussion in the tropical environment.

The first day comprised a joint session to consider the topics of 
interest to both working groups. This included a presentation from 
the GlobalNOC on some of the issues related to management and 
monitoring of the several optical networks they help operate. The 
operational and policy aspects of dynamic circuits were also 
considered, before the session was rounded-off with a presentation on 
the LHCOPN that connects the Large Hadron Collider with its data 
processing and storage sites.

The following day was dedicated to separate working group sessions. 
The Technical Working Group heard updates from the GOLEs, including 
TaiwanLight and AARnet for the first time. This was followed by a 
presentation from the CineGrid initiative about their experiences of 
using VLANs over lightpaths to stream digital media to various 
events. The rest of the session was used to discuss dynamic lightpath 
management, in particular the need to assign globally unique 
identifiers to lightpaths, how to undertake end-to-end monitoring, 
and how to improve the existing ticketing system.

In its own session, the Control Plane Working Group heard updates on 
the IDC protocol being developed by the DICE Collaboration. This will 
allow dynamic circuits in different domains to communicate with each 
other and users through the use of domain controllers. At the present 
time, there are several implementations available, but the plan is to 
converge these as more experience is gained. One application for IDC 
will be the Phoebus gateways which are used to break long-distance 
TCP connections into segments in order to improve performance.

In addition, the Control Plane Working Group was updated on 
developments related to the Generic Network Interface. GNS-WSI is 
based on web services and is used to reserve bandwidth between 
end-points. This can support multiple domains, and was used for the 
EnLIGHTened demo during the 7th Global LambdaGrid Workshop.

Finally, it was recommended that the Technical and Control Plane 
Working Groups should be merged. The motivation for this was due to 
the fact that the arrival of multi-domain dynamic lightpaths meant 
there was increasing overlap between the activities of the groups, 
and it would make more sense to break-out into smaller specialist 
groups as required. To this end, three task forces were formed to 
work on GOLE service level agreement definition, global lightpath 
identification, and GNI API development issues.

The next meetings will be held during the 8th Annual LambdaGrid 
Workshop in Seattle, USA on 1-2 October 2008.

About GLIF -- The Global Lambda Integrated Facility is an 
international virtual organisation of NRENs, consortia and 
institutions that promotes lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas 
internationally as an integrated facility to support data-intensive 
scientific research, and supports middleware development for lambda 
networking. It brings together some of the world's premier networking 
engineers to develop an international infrastructure by identifying 
equipment, connection requirements, and necessary engineering 
functions and services. More information is available on the GLIF 
website at http://www.glif.is/