Network Capabilities for the HL-LHC Era

Abstract

High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments rely on the networks as one of the critical parts of their infrastructure both within the participating laboratories and sites as well as globally to interconnect the sites, data centres and experiments instrumentation. Network virtualisation and programmable networks are two key enablers that facilitate agile, fast and more economical network infrastructures as well as service development, deployment and provisioning. Adoption of these technologies by HEP sites and experiments will allow them to design more scalable and robust networks while decreasing the overall cost and improving the effectiveness of the resource utilization. The primary challenge we currently face is ensuring that WLCG and its constituent collaborations will have the networking capabilities required to most effectively exploit LHC data for the lifetime of the LHC. In this paper we provide a high level summary of the HEPiX NFV Working Group report that explored some of the novel network capabilities that could potentially be deployment in time for HL-LHC.

Evolving the LHCOPN and LHCONE networks to support HL-LHC computing requirements

“…The LHCOPN and LHCONE community has proposed and is developing several research and development projects [9]. These projects have different scopes, but mainly they aim to improve the visibility of network performance to end users, to reduce network costs, to better exploit all the available bandwidth and to reduce link idle time.…”

NOTED: a framework to optimise network traffic via the analysis of data from File Transfer Services

“…The Software Defined Network Controller (SDNC) [6] is the component that actually modifies the configuration of network devices, implementing and removing special routing policies at the time suggested by the NI to https://www.overleaf.com/project/603908c888d36781d7fd1002improve the performance of data transfers. For example, a data transfer could be load-balanced over the primary, usual link and a second link which may have a different purpose, but it is under utilized at that moment.…”

Prototipação de Solução de Roteamento de Fonte para Suporte à Engenharia de Tráfego em Ciência de Dados Intensiva

“…Pesquisas científicas atuais têm gerado conjuntos de dados digitais na escala de petabytes por meio de detectores, simulac ¸ões e análises [Zurawski et al 2021]. Muitas destas pesquisas exigem colaborac ¸ão com outras instituic ¸ões e pesquisadores geograficamente dispersos pelo mundo [Babik et al 2020]. A troca de informac ¸ões entre os envolvidos exige que grande parte desse enorme volume de dados seja compartilhado para consumo, análise e apresentac ¸ão de resultados em tempo hábil para dar suporte a aplicac ¸ões de DIS (Ciência de Dados Intensiva, do inglês Data Intensive Science) [Guiang et al 2022].…”

“…Uma soluc ¸ão para atendimento a esses requisitos rigorosos das aplicac ¸ões de DIS é o uso da TE (Engenharia de Tráfego, do inglês Traffic Engineering) na rede [Babik et al 2020]. Entretanto, os mecanismos dos protocolos tradicionais de roteamento não permitem atualizar dinamicamente os melhores caminhos para utilizar a capacidade total da rede de forma mais eficiente [Dominicini et al 2020].…”