Computing Seminar

The Internet Backplane Protocol and the L-Bone project proposal

Micah Beck, University of Tennessee

Abstract

This talk will explore the concepts and mechanisms underlying Logistical Networking, a revolutionary architectural approach to communication that synthesizes elements of storage and wide area networking systems that are traditionally considered orthogonal. Logistical Networking is modeled on IP networking, and so its architecture is a stack with physical media and OS drivers at the bottom; an innovative layer that enables the scalable sharing of storage called the Internet Backplane Protocol (serving a function analogous to IP); and then the exNode, a tool for aggregating resources and enabling valuable end-to-end services such as reliability, high performance, and security (serving a function analogous to TCP). Researchers at the Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory at the University of Tennessee have been pursuing the development of these mechanisms and their integration into higher level middleware and application-level tools in an effort to create a new architecture for scalable computing in the wide area based on the successful architectural approach of the Internet. This new architecture offers a new framework for advanced Internet applications of all kinds, from scientific Grid computing to collaborative work to multimedia content delivery. Of particular interest are current efforts to deploy the Internet Backplane Protocol in a current multi-terabyte testbed (the L-Bone, mainly in the US) and a proposed petabyte-scale Logistical Networking Testbed that would span international universities and research labs.

About the speaker: Micah Beck has been a contributor to research ranging from Parallel and Distributed Systems to Languages and Compilers to Advanced Internetworking and Storage Architecture. He began his career doing research in distributed operating systems at Bell Laboratories and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University (1992) in the area of parallelizing compilers. He then joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, where he is currently a Research Associate Professor working in distributed high performance computing, networking and storage; he is also a Director of the Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory. An active participant in the Internet2 project, he has since 1997 led their Distributed Storage Infrastructure project, defining an advanced Content Distribution model to enable edge processing. In 2000 he joined with other members of this project drawn from industry and academia to found Lokomo Systems and he currently serves as Chief Scientist of that company.