Network Research Funded Project

Title: Pushing the Network Simulation Envelop – Extending the SSF to Tera-Scale Problems

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

PI: Bill Wing

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

, P.O. Box 2008

OAK Ridge Tennessee 37831-6355

Executive Summary

This project will port the JAVA implementation of the Scalable Simulation Facility (SSF) to ORNL's Terascale Computing facilities. It will develop a Terascale implementation of the SSF network simulator, demonstrate scaling it across the hybrid memory environment, and create a network simulation facility that will be able to study Terascale network problems (including problems of interest to DOE's SciDAC projects). We will produce a fully portable (based on MPI) simulator, able to run on any of DOE's Terascale Computing Resources. We will install the finished simulator on one or more Terascale facilities at ORNL and make it available to network researchers for analysis of 21^st century network problems. In addition, we will use it as a tool for further development and validation of high-performance protocols and for simulation of Terascale application-level network problems.

Deliverables and milestones

Year 1.

Evaluate inter-node communication mechanisms for cluster-based Java SSFNet, with respect to portability and performance, to include Java-MPI, native Java sockets, and other dedicated message-basedcommunication libraries.

Implement initial distributed-memory SSFnet Java kernel based on 1 above

Verify multi-threaded execution on multiple nodes.

Verify existing TCP and UDP classes

Year 2.

Demonstrate simulation of million-host network-level problem

Develop link-level framework (like SSFNet for transport layer) and port existing SSF link-level implementations run on the distributed memory kernel.

Extend classes to initial implementations of POS, ATM, and MPLS

Incorporate network error generation and diagnostics

Year 3.

Demonstrate simulation of Grid-like application level program

Incorporate BGP (and dynamic route) capabilities in distributed memory framework.

Extend classes to high-performance (ECN-based) protocols

Package (and document) additions to SSFnet for distribution to users