This page lists the institutions participating in the gigabit kits program and includes a brief description of their projects, with links to more detailed information in some cases.
| Institution: | Brown University |
| Project Title: | Scalable Extensible Distributed Shared Memory |
| Description: | Distributed systems of the future will provide parallelism at many different levels, ranging from multithreading within processors, to shared-memory multiprocessors, to geographically-dispersed networks of machines. We believe that a programming model based on object-based distributed shared memory is the most promising approach for systems based on multi-level parallelism. In this model, a collection of processing elements (PEs) share a set of data objects. Unlike message-passing models, where programmers must carefully orchestrate synchronization and data placement, distributed shared memory models permit transparent caching and synchronization, resulting in simpler and more robust programs. |
| PI: | Maurice Herlihy (mph@cs.brown.edu) Robert Netzer Steven Reiss |
| Institution: | Columbia University |
| Project Title: | Open Programmable Software for ATM, Internet and Mobile Multimedia Networking |
| Description: | link |
| PI: | Campbell, Andrew (campbell@ctr.columbia.edu) |
| Institution: | Cornell University |
| Project Title: | Achieving End-to-End Quality of Service and its Use for Next Generation Services |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | S. Keshav (skeshav@cs.cornell.edu) |
| Institution: | George Washington University |
| Project Title: | Proposal from the George Washington U. for a Gigabit ATM Network Kit |
| Description: | The George Washington University Virginia Campus plans to use the Gigabit ATM Network Kit for a combination of research and teaching. Several graduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer science are offered by GWU. For graduate courses in communication networks, the kit will be used for laboratory exercises and individual/class projects. Research areas will support GWU's own, expanding network and GWU's involvment in Internet II. More specific research areas include: (1) MPEG over ATM, (2) Multimedia Quality of Service, (3) ATM Security, and (4) Wireless ATM. |
| PI: | Smith, David R. |
| Institution: | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Project Title: | Active Networking and Critical Systems |
| Description: | Active networks allow users an extended measure of control over the behavior of the nodes in the network, as compared with traditional (passive) networks. The CANEs project at Georgia Tech is experimenting with architectures and applications for active networking, emphasizing the idea of bringing together application knowledge and network knowledge to enhance services to the user. The project comprises design of an architecture for active networking and exploration of applications that can benefit signficantly from active capabilities. Critical systems are characterized by stringent requirements and distinguish themselves from traditional computing systems in the consequences of failing to meet these requirements. Their need to meet requirements in performance, reliability, availability, safety, real-time and security, leads to specialized computational architectures and techniques that can provide high degrees of assurance, or guarantees that the systems will meet requirements and perform as intended. The research goal of this project is the development of software and hardware technologies that enable the construction of complex distributed applications and systems in face of dynamic application behaviors. The principal techniques being used to cope with system dynamics are the online configuration and adaptation of applications, middleware, and underlying operating system and communication substrates. |
| PI: | Ellen Zegura (ewz@cc.gatech.edu) Ken Calvert Karsten Schwan Sudha Yalamanchili |
| Institution: | Mississsippi State University |
| Project Title: | Active Networking and Heterogeneous Real-time SAN Systems |
| Description: | The High Performance Computing Laboratory at the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Computational Field Simulation at Mississippi State University is currently involved in several research projects involving advance networking hardware and software architectures. These projects include advanced network protocols, such as the proposed IETF PacketWay specification; advanced packet-switched networks, such as the Myricom Myrinet network; and active network layers. We are also co-developers, in collaboration with the Argonne National Laboratory, of MPICH -- the first implementation of the Message Passing Interface standard. The research goal of this project is to utilize the NSF/Washington University Gigabit Network Kit in advancing the state of the art in high-speed network systems, as well as providing students in graduate networking classes with a unique exposure to advanced network hardware. |
| PI: | Anthony Skjellum (tony@ERC.msState.edu) Robert George (robert@ERC.msState.edu) |
| Institution: | Naval Postgraduate School |
| Project Title: | An Efficient Network Architecture Motivated by Application-Level QoS |
| Description: |
Motivated by the fact that the network performance of application data
units is more important than that of packets, we have developed novel
network architecture and algorithms that are efficient in providing
performance guarantees to application data units, i.e., application-level
QoS.
In this project, we will investigate the practicality and performance of our architecture and algorithms at Gbps speed. Specifically, we will undertake the following two tasks:
|
| PI: | Xie, Geoffrey (xie@cs.nps.navy.mil) |
| Institution: | New Mexico State University | |
| Project Title: | Two Aspects of ATM: "Building Parallel Computer Systems" and "Using VBR Services for Voice Transmission" | |
| Description: |
Parallel Computation.
Eight high-end Pentium based, shared memory multiprocessor (SMP) systems
will be connected together via the ATM switch. The goal is to develop
parallel algorithms to be run on either the SMP nodes or across the switch.
Experiments will be made on the effects on throughput of using anticipated
cost and delay functions associated with large-scale data transfers.
Using VBR to transmit voice. Voice and video on any ATM network have traditionally been transmitted as a constant bit rate services. Though easy to implement such CBR services waste lot of precious bandwidth. The ATM switch will be used to build and evaluate a voice transmission model as a variable bit rate service. |
|
| PI: | Cowie, Jim (jcowie@crl.nmsu.edu) | Karshmer, Jim (arthur@cs.nmsu.edu) |
| Institution: | North Dakota State University |
| Project Title: | Distributed Data Processing Techniques over ATM |
| Description: | We are exploring distributed database system methods and performance for high speed network environments, particularly ATM. As commercial network speeds reach gigabits-per-second, the latency components of network transmission times start to dominate in wide-area environment, thus creating an upper bound for DB query throughput in such an environment. We are researching possibilities for moving some of the metadata processing from the host onto the network, thus reducing the number of messages passed between participating hosts. This technique is called "on-the-fly" (OTF) processing. OTF is an instance of, so called, "active networking" and will provide large performance gains on latency-dominated networks. Our bit-vector and bit-index based methods for distributed data processing lend themselves perfectly for OTF processing of metadata in an ATM network. |
| PI: | Perrizo, William (perrizo@plains.nodak.edu) |
| Institution: | Oakland University |
| Project Title: | Gigabit Networking |
| Description: |
The WUGS kits are located in our
High
Performance Digital Network, Multimedia, and Distance Learning
Laboratory
and are connected to several NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Sun workstations as well as
the
laboratory's Cisco Lightstream 1010 ATM switch.
We plan to involve at least two buildings in an experimental
gigabit/second backbone.
Our interests include:
|
| PI: | Srodawa, Ronald (srodawa@oakland.edu) |
| Institution: | Purdue University |
| Project Title: | Gigabit Bandwidth and Aggregate Functions |
| Description: |
At the Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
much of our research in parallel processing has focused on the fact
that different algorithms work best with different execution modes
(e.g., SIMD, MIMD) and communication models (e.g., message-passing,
shared memory, aggregate functions/collective communications). Under
the
PAPERS
project (Purdue's Adapter for Parallel Execution and Rapid
Synchronization), we have
developed custom hardware and public domain software that provides
clusters of unmodified PCs/workstations with very low-latency
aggregate operations that also efficiently support SIMD execution.
We propose to use the Gigabit hardware in two ways. First, we would use the existing PAPERS hardware to determine (at runtime) and implement conflict-free reliable communication schedules for the cluster's use of the Gigabit network, thus dramatically improving upon the low bandwidth of PAPERS while avoiding the acknowledgement and retransmission problems associated with unorchestrated cluster use of the Gigabit network. Second, we would implement a technique that we have developed so that the unreliable multicast facility of the Gigabit network itself can be used to implement PAPERS-like aggregate functions without the need for acknowledgements and with little or no loss of performance under high packet-loss rates. |
| PI: | Hank Dietz (hankd@ecn.purdue.edu) |
| Institution: | Rice University |
| Project Title: | Robust Admission Control and Congestion Control for ATM Networks |
| Description: | Our research addresses the following issues for QoS and high-speed networks. (1) Measurement-based admission control algorithms, in which we develop robust resource allocation schemes using empirical properties of the aggregate flow rather than client-specified traffic parameters. (2) End-to-end resource allocation schemes which build on our recent techniques for enforceable statistical services. These techniques exploit policeable deterministic parameters to statistically allocate network resources on an end-to-end basis. (3) Techniques for end-system QoS via a network subsystem that achieves low latency, high throughput, predictable service and safety, while maintaining existing APIs and protocol standards to the extent possible. This work builds on our previous work on Application Device Channels Lazy Receiver Processing and IO-Lite. (4) TCP congestion control over ATM, in which we study the performance of TCP Vegas and its variants on ATM networks. Early results show that Vegas is able to achieve performance benefits on ATM networks with significantly reduced dependence on Early Packet Discard (EPD) in the switches, and can achieve better throughput for much higher settings of the EPD threshold, resulting in higher utilization of switch buffers. |
| PI: | Edward W. Knightly (knightly@ece.rice.edu) Peter Druschel (druschel@cs.rice.edu) |
| Institution: | Southern Methodist University |
| Project Title: | Wireless ATM Network |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Lin, Eric (ecl@seas.smu.edu) |
| Institution: | State University of New York, Buffalo |
| Project Title: | Proposal for Gigabit ATM Network Kit |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Shu, Wei Wennie (shu@cs.buffalo.edu) |
| Institution: | State University of New York, Stony Brook |
| Project Title: | Suez: High-Performance Real-Time Scalable IP Router |
| Description: |
Suez
is a high-performance IP router that is built from
off-the-shelf Intel hardware and Gbit/sec system-area network
technology from Myrinet. There are several innovative features
of this system:
|
| PI: | Tzi-cker Chiueh (chiueh@cs.sunysb.edu) |
| Institution: | Technical University of Berlin, Germany |
| Project Title: | Integrated Broadband Mobile System (IBMS) |
| Description: | Integration of low and high data rate services for outdoor and in-house mobile communication systems based on ATM transmission. The technical approach includes among others: the system architecture design, smart antennas, advanced modulation, coding and access techniques for infrared and radio links. New efficient transport protocols for wireless communications, integration of different air-interfaces, transport technologies and services. Unified channel access. Within the scope of IBMS a testbed and a demonstrator will be build, based on the WUGS kit. |
| PI: | Adam Wolisz (wolisz@ft.ee.tu-berlin.de) Theo Assimakopoulos (thass@ft.ee.tu-berlin.de) |
| Institution: | University of California, Irvine |
| Project Title: | Proposal for the Gigabit ATM Network Kits Research Technology Distribution |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Suda, Tatsuya (suda@ics.uci.edu) |
| Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Project Title: | Gigabit ATM Network Kit - UCLA Research Proposal |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Gerla, Mario (gerla@cs.ucla.edu) |
| Institution: | University of California, San Diego |
| Project Title: | Enabling Distributed Brain Mapping Databases |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Chinoy, Bilal (bac@sdsc.edu) ,br> Mark Ellisman |
| Institution: | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| Project Title: | Proposal for a Gigabit ATM Network Kit |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Butner, S.E. (butner@ece.ucsb.edu) Melliar-Smith, P. M. (pmms@ece.ucsb.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Central Florida |
| Project Title: | Experimental Research on Real-time Distributed Applications over ATM |
| Description: |
Two WUGS ATM Kits will be used in the
Distributed Computing & Networking
Laboratory to help
our ongoing research in the areas of real-time distributed applications
and network congestion control/bandwidth allocation. Two of our planned
activities for using the two ATM switches include
The DIS application requires better dynamic multicast capability than what is commercially available. Specifically, there is a need to permit more frequent changes in the membership of multicast groups. There is also a need to increase the number of multicast groups that can be supported. We plan to investigate the performance implications of using ATM switches in DIS and other real-time applications. Of particular interest to us is to evaluate the time overhead of adding a new multicast connection and of tearing down an existing connection and the maximum rate by which members of a multicast connection can change and to investigate schemes that can increase the value of this latter rate. The availability of the gigabit switches along with APIC chips supporting AAL_5 will also provide a realistic setup (complementing software simulation) for evaluating our ongoing networking research projects in a number of areas including adaptive congestion control and quality of service/bandwidth allocation for multimedia traffic. |
| PI: | Mostafa Bassiouni (bassi@cs.ucf.edu) Ratan K. Guha (guha@cs.ucf.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Illinois |
| Project Title: | Quality of Service Enhancement of Washington University Gigabit Switch Using the Illinois Input Queue |
| Description: | Scalable networks that transport integrated data using the same underlying technology can be built using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). To support Quality of Service on the WUGS, we propose to augment the hardware with an input module that provides congestion control and per-virtual circuit queueing. The UIUC 3DQ is an intelligent queue which provides QoS by organizing cells according to their priority, destination, and virtual circuit. A functional prototype of this module, called the Illinois Input Queue (iiQueue), has been prototyped using a printed circuit board, field programmable gate arrays, and SRAM Memory. For this research, we propose to integrate the WUGS and the iiQueue to build a highly scalable ATM switch which supports per-virtual circuit QoS. |
| PI: | John Lockwood (lockwood@ipoint.vlsi.uiuc.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Iowa |
| Project Title: | ATM Distributed Medical Imaging |
| Description: |
Two Washington University (W.U.) Gigabit Network Kits will be used to help
facilitate medical imaging research at the University of Iowa by networking
together researchers in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering
(ECE) and Radiology. This high-speed network will provide an efficient means
for sharing data, computing, and visualization between laboratories and will
provide high-speed access to the University of Iowa supercomputer. Not only will
existing projects benefit from this high-speed network but it will make many new
areas of research possible.
In addition to medical imaging, we plan to use the W.U. technology for ATM research and teaching. The W.U. ATM technology will enhance two existing ATM research projects dealing with network based parallel processing and quality of service. In the first project, the requested switches will be used to test prototype scheduling mechanisms and to empirically calibrate the simulation model. The second project will use the switch to evaluate active networking schemes, calibrate simulations, and test cell-marking and buffer management mechanisms, if suitable NIC modifications can be made. The Gigabit Network Kit will be incorporated in to the teaching curriculum by connecting it directly to the College of Engineering Electronic Classroom. Direct access to the switch by students will provide hands-on experience with ATM protocols in our existing senior level networking course. In addition, the high-speed connection of the electronic classroom with the University Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) and the outside world will facilitate further enhancement of our already very successful project of electronic-image-systems-engineering instruction. |
| PI: | Christensen, Gary (gec@eng.uiowa.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Kansas |
| Project Title: | Proposal for Two Gigabit ATM Network Kits |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Minden, Gary (gminden@eecs.ukans.edu) Evans, Joseph |
| Institution: | University of Missouri, Kansas City |
| Project Title: | UMKC Gigabit ATM Networking Project |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Medhi, Deep (dmedhi@cstp.umkc.edu) |
| Institution: | University of North Dakota and University of Toledo |
| Project Title: | A Joint Proposal for Gigabit Network Kits |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Alam, M. (malam@eecs.utoledo.edu) Valeroso, E.S. (valeroso@cs.und.edu) |
| Institution: | University of South Florida |
| Project Title: | Gigabit ATM Network Testbed for Traffic Management Research |
| Description: | The efficient transportation of real-time Variable Bit Rate (VBR) video traffic in the high-speed networks has been an area of active research. The VBR video traffic characteristics having heavy tail distribution, high variance and correlation properties are quite complex to be captured by a single traffic model. While many methods have been proposed in the literature focusing on various aspects of the VBR video traffic characteristics and their impact on the traffic management, a wider perspective of various issues involved in the efficient transportation of VBR video traffic with high utilization of network resources is imperative. Moreover one important issue is the simplicity with which the bandwidth allocation and scheduling schemes can be executed online with real-time constraints in the future Gigabit networks. The correlation properties of the VBR video traffic make the predictor-based online traffic adaptation techniques attractive. In order to reduce the effects of the prediction errors on the queueing system, we have designed a novel short-term controller (STC) that works at the cell-level and the system is called the Predictor-STC system. Simple online prediction based bandwidth allocation scheme and a scheduling algorithm for the STC suitable for implementation in high-speed networks have been designed. We are developing an integrated framework addressing the issues in the VBR video traffic management based on the Predictor-STC exploiting the correlation properties. While most of our current research relies on simulation results, the use of Gigabit Network Kit (GNK) should provide a better insight into how our architecture and other existing methods work vis-a-vis the QoS that can be provided to the end-user. We intend to evaluate the proposed architecture using the Gigabit Network Kit. More details of the research can be found at the project web site. |
| PI: | Sankar, Ravi (sankar@eng.usf.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Southern California |
| Project Title: | GNT Distribution Kit Request |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Touch, Joe (touch@isi.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Stuttgart RUS |
| Project Title: | MeCOSA |
| Project Description: | The main goal of
MEtaCOmputing Sci Atm will
be the combination of PC-Clusters with Gigabit ATM .
The planned activities include:
|
| PI: | Paul Christ (christ@rus.uni-stuttgart.de) Tassilo Erlewein (erlewein@rus.uni-stuttgart.de) |
| Institution: | University of Tennessee |
| Project Title: | ATM Support for Heterogeneous Distributed Computing |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Dongarra, Jack (dongarra@msr.epm.ornl.gov) |
| Institution: | University of Texas, Austin |
| Project Title: | Providing End-to-End Performance Guarantees to Applications |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Lam, Simon (lam@cs.utexas.edu) |
| Institution: | University of Troms, University of Oslo, Norewegian Defence Research Establishment, SINTEF and Animagic Systems AS |
| Project Title: | MULTE |
| Description: | The goal of the MULTE project is to
develop flexible and adaptable middleware that
will support a wide range of
Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in distributed
multimedia applications. We propose an approach based
on a flexible (re)configurable protocol system to
achieve our goal.
We intend to build a complete prototype of such a system implemented by the ATM Gigaswitch, CORBA, WindowsNT and Chorus and other off the shelf technologies. The project is funded by the participants and has been awarded an additional 5 Million NOK funding by the Norwegian Research Council under the national research project Enhanced Next-Generation Computing Environment. |
| PI: | Robert Halseth Macdonald (robert-h.macdonald@ffi.no) |
| Institution: | University of Wisconsin |
| Project Title: | Gigabit ATM Network Kits Research Technology Distribution Program |
| Description: | add later |
| PI: | Ramanathan, Parameswaran (parmesh@ece.wisc.edu) |
| Institution: | Yale University |
| Project Title: | Fixing up NOWs |
| Description: | Networks of workstations (NOWs) are frequently touted as an alternative to parallel computers, but NOWs, as currently implemented, exhibit serious shortcomings. Today's NOWs have unpredictable message-passing performance (one process can steal communications bandwidth from another), they have high message-handling overheads and latencies (to protect one process from another), and they exhibit poor performance for global synchronization (there is no hardware support for barriers.) We propose to use a University of Washington Gigabit ATM Switch Kit to investigate solutions to these problems. We will attack the problems of predictable bandwidth, message-handling costs, and global barriers. We propose to use two applications, computer chess and distributed vision, to investigate the performance impact of our mechanisms. |
| PI: | Kuszmaul, Bradley (bradley@ee.yale.edu) Henry, Dana (dana@ee.yale.edu) |
Prepared by Jonathan Turner: jst@cs.wustl.edu. Last updated 8/21/97.