Logistical networking: a global storage network**This work is supported by the Department of Energy SciDAC Program (esp. Terascale Supernova Initiative) under grant #DE-FC02-01ER25465 and by the Center for Gyokinetic Particle Simulation of Turbulent Transport in Burning Plasmas, under award #DE-FG02-04ER25651. Additional support was provided by the Center for Information Technology Research (CITR) of the University of Tennessee. The infrastructure used

Abstract

The absence of an adequate distributed storage infrastructure for data buffering has become a significant impediment to the flow of work in the wide area, data intensive collaborations that are increasingly characteristic of leading edge research in several fields. One solution to this problem, pioneered under DOE's SciDAC program, is Logistical Networking, which provides a framework for a globally scalable, maximally interoperable storage network based on the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP). This paper provides a brief overview of the Logistical Networking (LN) architecture, the middleware developed to exploit its value, and a few of the applications that some of research communities have made of it.