Developing Applications with Networking Capabilities via End-to-End SDN (DANCES)

Abstract

The Developing Applications with Networking Capabilities via End-to-End SDN (DANCES) project [1] is a collaboration between The University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences (UT-NICS), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), and Internet2 to investigate and develop the ability to add network bandwidth scheduling via software-defined networking (SDN) programmability to selected cyberinfrastructure services and applications. DANCES, funded by the National Science Foundation's Campus Cyberinfrastructure -- Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) program award numbers 1341005, 1340953, and 1340981, has field tested five vendor network devices in order to determine which implements the DANCES requirements of the OpenFlow 1.3 standard to provide the network reservation and rate-limiting capability desired to implement the goals of DANCES. Another key device selection criterion was sufficient packet buffering to handle wide area network flows without excessive packet loss. After selection of the network device a test environment was setup between UT-NICS and PSC to perform SDN tests in a simulated supercomputer center compute and data transfer resource environment. This paper describes the DANCES project, the DANCES OpenFlow 1.3 specification requirements, the determination and acquiring of a sufficient OpenFlow 1.3 network device, the provisioning of a test environment, and the test plan and results obtained so far by the DANCES team.