About DANCES

About DANCES

The major project goal of Developing Applications with Networking Capabilities via End-to-End SDN (DANCES) is to add network bandwidth scheduling capability via software-defined networking (SDN) programmability to selected cyberinfrastructure applications. The bandwidth control and scheduling capability will be used to mitigate congestion-induced throughput problems on end-site networks. The selected cyberinfrastructure applications include job scheduling and resource management and wide-area distributed file systems. The project will extend the TORQUE/Moab scheduling and management currently in use at the XSEDE supercomputing sites to support networking as a requested resource. If possible within the duration of the project, network bandwidth scheduling will also be integrated into the Uniform Interface to Computing Resources (UNICORE) Grid system. The wide area distributed file systems selected for bandwidth scheduling integration are the XSEDE-wide File System (IBM’s General Parallel File System, GPFS) and SLASH2, which was developed at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Support for DANCES requires the integration of SDN-capable hardware and software infrastructure at the collaborating sites.