Mar 13, 2013

Project ADAMANT Wins Innovations in Networking Award for XD Apps

Project ADAMANT, a collaborative effort of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI), RENCI/UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke University, has been honored by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as the recipient of the 2013 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developmental Applications.

Workflows, especially data-driven workflows and workflow ensembles, are becoming a centerpiece of modern computational science. However, scientists lack the tools that integrate the operation of workflow-driven science applications on top of dynamic infrastructures that link campus, institutional and national resources into connected arrangements targeted at solving a specific problem. These tools must (a) orchestrate the infrastructure in response to application demands, (b) manage application lifetime on top of the infrastructure by monitoring various workflow steps and modifying slices in response to application demands, and (c) integrate data movement with the workflows to optimize performance.

Project ADAMANT (Adaptive Data-Aware Multi-domain Application Network Topologies) brings together researchers from RENCI/UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University and USC/ISI and two successful software tools to solve these problems. The software tools employed are Pegasus workflow management system and ORCA resource control framework, developed for NSF GENI. The integration of Pegasus and ORCA enables powerful application-driven and data-driven virtual topology embedding into multiple institutional and national substrates (providers of cyber-resources, like computation, storage and networks).

Project ADAMANT leverages ExoGENI, an NSF-funded GENI testbed, as well as national research and education network providers of on-demand bandwidth services, specifically, National LambdaRail (NLR), Internet2 (I2), and the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and existing OSG computational resources to create elastic, isolated environments to execute complex distributed tasks. This approach improves the performance of these applications and, by explicitly including data movement planning into the application workflow, enables new unique capabilities for distributed data-driven "Big Science" applications.

Innovations in Networking Awards are given annually by CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations which leverage ultra high-bandwidth networking, particularly where those innovations have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction and research are conducted or where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas.

* This project is funded by the National Science Foundation Office of CyberInfrastructure (OCI) under award #1245997.

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