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Brazil to Create Nat'l Virtual Disk for Data Intensive Apps

Grid Today

21.11.2005

An initiative to create a National Virtual Disk (NVD) for the Brazilian research and education community is among the new projects just announced by the Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), Brazil's research networking organization. Under the project, the Network Storage Working Group (NSWG) will deploy distributed storage infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with Brazil's high-performance research network and helps users to solve the daunting logistical problems associated with moving, staging and caching of massive amounts of scientific data and digital media content. Building on storage technology already widely deployed in the United States (Internet2, ESNet) and Europe (CESNET), the Brazilian NVD aims to facilitate the exchange and publication of bulk data both inside the country and internationally.

Today, many user communities on high-performance networks are experiencing the need for the kind of distributed storage service the NVD will offer. Both the explosion in amount of data that must be managed and the increasing importance of distributed collaboration have made problems of data logistics substantially more acute. As the application environment becomes more data intensive and collaborative, various factors (e.g., long transfer times, the need for asynchronous multicast and erratic or bursty traffic conditions) tend to aggravate inefficiencies in data management in distributed applications. Under such conditions, conventional approaches to problems of distributed data management can break down no matter how much network bandwidth is applied. The RNP is building the NVD because it recognizes that storage is a key element of the communication infrastructure that must be improved to address these problems.

The NVD will use highly scalable network storage technology based on the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP). IBP is a generic, low-level protocol for managing and sharing distributed storage resources in the wide area. Developed at the Logistical Computing and Internetworking (LoCI) Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, it is being used for a wide area of applications in scientific research and digital media distribution. A nation-wide deployment of IBP storage depots already supports the RNP's DynaVideo project, enabling RNP-connected institutions to share large video objects and broadcasts (including HDTV quality) across the network, and to time-shift recordings of live events for later replay on-demand to any network location. The NVD will build on and expand the capabilities of that infrastructure, with an initial deployment of 5TB.

"The approach were taking is designed to enable us to scale up the infrastructure in the most cost effective way possible, while at the same time maximizing performance across the network," said Sergio Takeo Kofuji of the University of Sao Paulo (USP), head of the NSWG. "Just like the network itself, the open storage technology we're using will also allow different types of applications to customize as much as they want to meet their needs without sacrificing interoperability."

The NVD user community will immediately support various different kinds of applications, including Grid computing, data mining and digital video. Participating projects include DynaVideo and OurGrid, which is the computational Grid solution developed by Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Federal University of Campina Grande.

fonte: http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=512288&xsl