SBIR-STTR Award

With network bandwidth increasing more rapidly than processor speed for the past two decades, a serious performance problem exists for the transport, storage, and retrieval of large amounts of scientific data. The client of a clustered file system, which acts as the middleman between the Grid network and the rest of the file system, is the most heavily loaded component. This project will develop new client hardware architecture for network line-rates approaching 10 Gb/s and beyond. The architecture will include Intel SMP processors to handle the application and the network session layer; network processors such as TCP offload engines, IP routers, and gigabit Ethernet interfaces; and a new FPGA design to support high speed bus bandwidth. Phase I will design the new client hardware architecture; profile the clustered file system processor loads; profile the system loads with TCP off-loading, using a network processor development board; evaluate the performance improvement; extrapolate performance on the proposed new client hardware architecture; and identify and understand any bottlenecks in handling 10 Gb/s Grid network data transport and beyond.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
The processing and routing engine would provide an economical interface between 10Gb/s and 1Gb/s. Besides its application for the high-performance clustered file system, other applications include data storage and retrieval for GridFtp, an enabling technology for on-demand video server, on-demand game server, and high-speed data warehouse replication

With network bandwidth increasing more rapidly than processor speed for the past two decades, a serious performance problem exists for the transport, storage, and retrieval of large amounts of scientific data. This project will identify current performance bottlenecks, and develop a high-performance, processing and forwarding engine-hardware architecture that will handle data rates of 10 Gbps and beyond. Phase I developed a software profile and determinged system performance for a scaled-down version (1Gbps) of the Grid Network Session Processing and Forwarding Engine (GNSPFE). The results were used to extrapolate the design of the 10 Gbps Engine. Phase II will develop a prototype 10 Gbps GNSPFE and verify its peformance on a transoceanic network.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
The Grid Network Session Processing and Forwarding Engine should become an enabling technology, providing economical 10 Gbps service to high-performance cluster file systems. In addition, the technology should find use as a Grid network solution for file servers, on-demand video servers, and game servers.