Gigabit Testbeds Final Report

Contents

List of Figures

Executive Summary

1 Introduction

2 The Starting Point

2.1 A Brief History

2.2 State of Very High-Speed Networking in 1989-90

2.3 Gigabit Networking Research Issues

Network Issues

Platform Issues

Application Issues

3 Structure and Goals

3.1 Initiative Formation

3.2 Initiative Management

3.3 The Testbeds

4 Investigations and Findings

4.1 Transmission

4.1.1 SONET

Carrier-provisioned SONET Links

SONET Crossconnect

Customer Premises Access

Variable-length Packets

4.1.2 Other Transmission Technologies

Wide Area All-optical Transmission

Local Area Fiber Technologies

4.1.3 Striping

4.2 Switching

Sunshine Switch

Fetex 150 Switch

Local and Desk Area ATM Switching

Planet/Orbit Switching

Local-Area HIPPI Switching

Wide-Area HIPPI Switching

Preemptive Switching

4.3 Interworking

4.3.1 HIPPI-ATM

4.3.2 HIPPI-SONET

4.3.3 Seamless ATM

4.3.4 IP-based Interconnection

4.4 Host I/O

4.4.1 Direct ATM Connections

Bus Transfers and Data Movement

ATM Performance

4.4.2 PTM Interfacing

4.4.3 Transport

Checksum Computation

Data Movement

Protocol Performance

Data Conversion

4.4.4 Parallel Architectures

iWarp Streams Architecture

4.4.5 Distributed Shared Memory

4.5 Network Management

Tenet Real-Time Protocol Suite

Weighted Fair Queueing for ATM

Extending QoS to Applications

Dynamic Packet Scheduling

4.5.2 Congestion/Flow Control

4.5.3 Traffic Measurement/Characterization

4.6 Applications and Support Tools

4.6.1 Distributed Computation

Quantum Chemical Dynamics

Global Climate Modeling

Chemical Process Optimization

General Branch and Bound Problems

4.6.2 Human Interaction

Dynamic Radiation Therapy Planning

Remote Visualization

CALCRUST: Interactive Geophysics

4.6.3 General Support Tools

5 Conclusion

Testbed Results and Technology Trends

Future Research Infrastructure

Appendix A: Publications and Reports