Logistical Networking: A Global Storage Network

Micah Beck and Terry Moore

The absence of an adequate distributed storage infrastructure for data buffering has become a significant impediment to the flow of work in the wide area, data intensive collaborations that are increasingly characteristic of leading edge research in several fields. One solution to this problem, pioneered under DOE’s SciDAC program, is Logistical Networking, which provides a framework for a globally scalable, maximally interoperable storage network based on the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP). This poster provides a an overview of the Logistical Networking (LN) architecture, the middleware developed to exploit its value, and a few of the applications that SciDAC research communities have made of it.