A White Paper by
ESSC ADVANCED APPLICATIONS REQUIREMENTS
WORKING GROUP
Martin Greenwald, Sandy Merola, Larry Price, Bill Wing
for the ESnet Steering Committee
February 14, 1998
SUMMARY
In this paper the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Steering Committee (ESSC) makes an initial identification of advanced
networking technologies that are expected to underlie the future
success of DOE science.
The ESSC provides this information in
an attempt to influence future networking services as well as
associated research and development. We identify seven application
areas that, with appropriate development, promise to serve as
a foundation for expected expansion and extension of DOE programmatic
research capabilities. We then identify and discuss five cross-cutting
network technologies that will enable and/or accelerate further
scientific application advancements. We close this paper with
a short discussion of network research and development and, finally,
a brief discourse on the benefits of a collaborative approach.
We note here that the success of ESnet is ultimately
determined by the advancements in DOE science that the network
facilitates. We commend the ESnet providers on their success to
date within budget constraints and given agreed prioritization.
Past experience has demonstrated that networking
advances are both application driven and technology driven. ESnet
must continue to be responsive to both. The DOE community has
applications that the next generation of network services must
support. Synergistically, network-based technological developments
will benefit the applications community. Local-area networking,
shared whiteboards embedded into workstation videoconferencing
tools, and the World Wide Web are all examples of network-based
technological advances that have benefited the network user community.
Thus, ESnet must be responsive to the needs of the programmatic
applications community as well as the network research community.
BACKGROUND
The ESnet Steering Committee formed an Applications
Requirements Working Group to help ensure that future network
requirements of the ESnet community are identified. In particular,
this working group focused on applications whose demands, in the
five-year time frame, are expected to exceed current network services.
We acknowledge and appreciate the input from members of the ESnet
Coordinating Committee, MICS-funded network research principal
investigators, and principal investigators throughout the DOE
community, including participants in the recent DOE Large Scale
Networking Workshop. As we work together to realize the benefit
of network advancements, we expect that the ESSC, the ESnet implementation
team, and the MICS program office will supplement this document
with experience acquired from DOE2000, the Network Challenged
Applications program, and other contacts within the DOE research
community.
THE PRESENT ROLE OF ESnet IN DOE RESEARCH
ESnet was established in 1986 to provide commonly
needed network services to DOE's Energy Research programs, following
a decade during which computer networking became established as
an essential tool for research and each of the programs had found
its own way to provide networking. A steering committee was established
to provide input on networking requirements and to provide information
back to the programs on developments in networking. This mission
of ESnet and the composition of the ESSC were later expanded to
include other significant partners within the DOE community.
The rather unexpected result of the feedback
arrangement among the ESSC, the MICS program office, and the ESnet
implementation team was a notable degree of coevolution of the
research programs and the network. In many cases, the network
has been tailored to provide for specific program requirements,
and in turn the programs have been able to quickly and efficiently
utilize new capabilities of the network. Network research has
helped advance the network services of this community and the
entire Internet. After eleven years of ESnet, there is a significant
and growing degree of integration between the network and the
programs. While this paper is primarily about future needs, we
provide some brief examples of current advanced uses of the network.
Large collaborations of scientists are typical
of the ESnet community. In the high-energy and nuclear physics
and fusion communities, for example, collaborations typically
encompass hundreds of scientists who rely heavily on effective
interactive, network-based communications. Collaborative authoring
of research papers, computer codes, and other documents by extended
groups is an early and continuing use of the network. The ability
to exchange documents within minutes has transformed the effectiveness
of distant collaboration by shortening the time between modification
iterations by orders of magnitude. While use of email for this
purpose had already provided an enormous benefit, the current
embellishments of multimedia files, annotation, and real-time
distributed shared workspace dramatically improve efficiency.
Subsequent improvements in bandwidth and networking
tools facilitated the collaborative analysis of large data sets
from multiple remote locations. This development, combined with
collaborative writing, was crucial in permitting the formation
of larger collaborations of scientists and enabling them to address
larger scientific problems. A recent extension in this series
of network enhancements, still maturing, is the ability of a scientist
to participate remotely in data-taking sessions, with visual,
graphical, and other data returned from the experimental site.
Remote conferencing is also important to current
research work. Conferencing encompasses communications that mimic
the interactions of a group of people around a conference table.
Modern conferencing can provide real-time video of participants
and presentations, with shared copies of documents for editing
and annotation and high-quality audio communications for discussion.
The requisite software must be easily installable on popular platforms,
the environments created must follow consistent rules for ease
of use with a reduced learning curve, and conferences must be
easy to establish. Scientific collaboration, from experiment design
to analysis, generally requires detailed interaction between the
instrument scientists and the application scientists. This has
just become possible through the use of network collaboration
tools, resulting in a growing appreciation of collaborative possibilities
given the right mix of tools.
These networking-based services and others
have augmented the abilities and enhanced the effectiveness of
the DOE scientific community. Services continue to expand and
improve in response to developing needs of researchers.
EVOLUTION OF NETWORK REQUIREMENTS
While developments in the programmatic research
of the ESnet community cannot be predicted with complete clarity,
it is clear that the scientific community will depend increasingly
on the integration of network-based services directly into the
scientific environment. The ESnet Program Plan, to be available
at http://www.es.net/pub/esnet-doc/esnet-program-plan/1998/index.html,
provides a detailed look at future directions of these programs.
In this document, we only report on the implications
of current planning and make a modest extrapolation for what comes
later. No attempt has been made to identify explicit site connectivity
or associated bandwidth requirements. Rather, we have focused
on applications requiring advanced networking services. The future
of network service requirements is driven not only by the forecast
of future network-based applications, but also by research that
will advance the performance and services of ESnet and the Internet
as a whole. The following sections summarize the new networking
capabilities that will be needed by developments in applications
and networking.
We have sorted application-driven requirements into the principal areas of:
We have sorted opportunities and requirements that are driven by anticipated service-offering advances into the network cross-cutting areas of:
APPLICATION AREAS
Remote Experimental Operations
Remote control of instruments and facilities
is a very new and experimental capability. It has already found
important uses in a few cases and several more trials are underway.
Beginning with turbulence measurements on the Princeton Plasma
Physics Laboratory's TFTR tokamak, plasma diagnostics have been
run remotely from controlled fusion experiments for almost a decade.
Recently this work has been extended to include proof-of-principle
demonstrations of full remote control of tokamak operations, first
on Alcator C-Mod at MIT and later on DIII-D at General Atomics.
Developments in remote experimental operations require close cooperation
between network managers and developers on the one hand and instrument
builders and users on the other. Vigorous development will bring
enormous benefits to research programs, including more efficient
utilization of costly or unique instruments, as well as more efficient
use of researchers' time. Further, the ability to correlate results
from multiple instruments will greatly improve the depth of scientific
understanding resulting from such measurements.
The remote control of experiments requires
secure and guaranteed network transactions to ensure accurate
and safeguarded control. Thus network security, authorization,
and guaranteed bandwidth on demand are critical to success.
Large amounts of data are typically captured
at the experiment site and are made available to the local researcher.
The remote researchers must be provided with shared and distributed
access to this experimental data and to shared applications. This
might include access to large relational and object-oriented databases;
the creation, access, and use of electronic notebooks; and visualization
tools for remote data and applications performance analysis. All
of these requirements will need to take place in real time, and
the remote experimenter may not be located directly on an ESnet-backbone
site.
Scientists involved in remote experimentation
would greatly benefit from the existence of an environment (albeit
virtual) similar to that at the experimental site proper. This
places a demand on the network to support shared virtual environments
including teleimmersion. Teleimmersion allows users to see, hear,
and touch each other and a representation of their data in a simulation
of the actual environment. Teleimmersion relies on virtual reality
display environments at each location and high-performance network
connections between locations. Resulting data flows range from
streaming audio and video to virtual reality tracking data and
interactive simulation updates. Additionally, diagnostics, remote
access to machine status, and other related subsystems must be
supported by the network with appropriate prioritization.
Authentication and security services are required
at some level for all networked applications but are particularly
important for experimental collaborations where expensive (and
possibly hazardous) equipment may be involved.
Distributed Parallel Computing
A new computing paradigm, generating increased
networking requirements as success stories spread, is distributed
parallel computing. This approach to problem solving has been
called by various names, including computational grids, computational
nets, and simply distributed computing.
Two endpoints of distributed parallel computing
are worth noting here. At one extreme, the environment would offer
the sharing of a small number of distributed and unique high-performance
computers. At the other extreme, the environment might consist
of sharing very large numbers of underutilized desktop machines.
For example, a cluster of 44 networked workstations was used to
process video images containing complex three-dimensional information
from the DIII-D tokamak and map the resulting data onto magnetic
flux surfaces. The calculations would have taken more than a year
on a single machine. Between these two extremes, a new class of
distributed computing is growing, based on coupling resources
on a user's desk with both local and geographically remote computing
resources. As more and more sites assemble Beowulf-class computers
and are willing to broker time among them, an expanded supercomputing
community is forming, and associated networking requirements are
expanding.
At the present time, the class of problems
that lend themselves to this sort of distributed computational
effort is relatively small. Algorithms that can successfully hide
latency measured in tens of milliseconds instead of microseconds
are still emerging from developers. However the rewards of being
able to distribute problems across a meta-computer, whose resources
are "free" within the brokering scheme, are so great
they are being pursued by several groups. The next step in realizing
such an approach is a formal, object-based computational model
that allows the problem to gracefully use available resources
without intrusively dominating them. Conceptually, this is a realization
of the concept that the network serves as the actual backplane
of the meta-computer that is composed of all the resources available
on the network.
Remote/Shared Code Development
Most ESnet programs are increasingly dependent
on collaborative work by researchers at distant locations. Thus,
ESnet must support the collaborative development of large codes
for simulation, data analysis, and other purposes. High-energy
and nuclear physics collaborations typically require a centralized
mechanism to control the distributed code development. As distributed
computing and remote visualization become more prevalent, increased
demands will be made on ESnet in this area.
Distributed code development teams can make
use of desktop videoconferencing, a common code-version control
system, an electronic notebook to document coding changes, common
output display demonstrations, and other available communication
and collaboration technologies. A common on-line code-sharing
library would improve code and data access, code interconnection,
and code invocation. Finally, large-scale projects, including
the Spallation Neutron Source to be constructed at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, will require code development and optimization by
over 100 users, well beyond the ability of present network-based
tools to work effectively.
Issues such as the efficient use of distributed
compute cycles, reliable asynchronous intertask communications,
multicasting of data, the remote display and downloading of results,
distributed task queuing, and session management will all need
to be addressed if progress is to be made in this area.
Remote and Distributed Data Access
The network should enable transparent data
access from remote locations for either storage or retrieval.
A variety of technologies exist for this purpose-for example,
distributed files systems, caching, distributed objects, and remote
procedure calls-each appropriate for different applications. In
general, these require a software infrastructure including an
intuitive and consistent user interface, coordinated management,
and other services.
Many programs using ESnet will be mounting
experiments or simulation efforts that will generate enormous
quantities of data. For example, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)
in Geneva, Switzerland, and RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider)
in Upton, New York, will each generate about a petabyte (million
gigabytes) per year of raw data. Data rates from the Jefferson
Lab accelerator in Newport News, Virginia, and the Tevatron Collider
in Chicago, Illinois, are only slightly smaller. These data rates
are so high that data analysis and reduction on the order of hundreds
or thousands are necessary before it is feasible to move the data
over the Internet. Data sets from Atmospheric Research, Basic
Energy Sciences, and Fusion Energy Sciences are on the order of
terabytes (thousand gigabytes). Across the ESnet community, it
can be expected that in another decade at least 20 petabytes of
raw data will be generated per year.
Large and rapidly growing databases of biological
structure and sequence information are only tenuously connected
to locally executed programs. Typically life scientists download
entire databases or subsets, while others execute programs made
available over the Internet which perform queries at the remote
database site. This community would benefit from the existence
of middleware APIs allowing programs to connect across the Internet
directly to the databases, returning the appropriate files or
query results to the program for immediate use.
The communities needing to use the data are
distributed and will need to access the data multiple times from
many different locations. In many cases, the data sets themselves
will also be distributed across the network. Tools to manage and
integrate views of distributed data will need to be developed.
Work has begun on these issues at Berkeley Lab, Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center, Brookhaven, and CERN, focused on object-oriented
databases and hierarchical storage systems in support of BABAR,
RHIC, and LHC.
Given such large databases, additional strategies
are needed to reduce the impact of moving these data over the
wide-area network. Local data reduction and data compression are
two such strategies. Methods for providing users with estimates
of the "costs" for accessing particular data (query
estimation) may also be useful. Little has been done so far, however,
to optimize network use through caching strategies. Database and
network researchers will need to collaborate to solve this problem.
Because generation of data is clearly increasing faster than bandwidth
available on the Internet, it may be necessary to assess computational
models in terms of their impact on the network.
Collaborative Engineering
Engineering has also become a collaborative
effort, with design and analysis carried out by teams spread across
the country and around the world. In this environment, excellent
interactive communication is essential. Shared design efforts
require effective tools for sharing files, displaying and annotating
electronic drawings, and remote conferencing. An environment that
must be virtually replicated over the network is that of a team
of engineers sitting around a table piled with large, high-resolution
drawings. Shared three-dimensional environments would greatly
aid in visualizing complex structures and systems. Large-scale
engineering codes are used in many areas of analyses. Three-dimensional
thermal, structural, neutronic, and electromagnetic problems (often
coupled) can often be solved only with the use of the powerful
supercomputers. Engineers remote from the supercomputer centers
need distributed computing tools to share the workload between
local and remote systems and advanced visualization tools for
analyzing the results.
Visualization
DOE scientists routinely perform computer simulations,
computer modeling, and the analysis and synthesis of large amounts
of experimental data, converting them into pictures or animation
using sophisticated but data-intensive visualization techniques.
Requirements for visualization techniques and associated data
management permeate the ESnet user community, including plasma
physics, climate analysis, materials, chemistry, computational
fluid dynamics, combustion, DNA analysis, particle analysis, and
astrophysics.
Applications of such scale can be executed
only in environments with large amounts of memory and processor
speed. An emerging trend to address this problem is massively
parallel processor (MPP)-based visualization tools, requiring
connectivity with high bandwidth and low latency among the researcher's
visualization environment, the MPP, and the data storage site.
Given the scarcity of MPP systems, these environments are typically
geographically dispersed. To achieve interactive rates, images
must be delivered to the desktop at 5 to 30 frames per second,
challenging the network's bandwidth and responsiveness. While
interactions from the user to the MPP (typically generated by
the movement of a mouse or the pressing of a switch) may not require
large amounts of bandwidth, the needed response requires minimal
network latency.
Similar requirements are typical of shared
work spaces, immersive visualization environments including latency-intolerant
haptic devices, and remote experimentation.
Teleconferencing and Videoconferencing
The ESnet community has embraced and benefited
greatly from the present availability of conference-room-based
videoconferencing. Useful as it is, teleconferencing is in its
infancy and needs major improvements. Advances are needed initially
in ease of use, the incorporation of multimedia interactions,
in the shared creation and editing of documents, and in the integration
with data collection and analysis environments. The expansion
of usage has increased the need for service directories, and the
multiplicity of participants in any single session has created
the need for floor control capabilities. Both are needed to ensure
the future viability of teleconferencing. Additionally, as tools
become easier to use and more integrated into the networked environment,
general planning and coordination services will be needed.
Demands from the increased utilization of workstation-based
videoconferencing could be enormous. The high-energy and nuclear
physics communities suggest that their videoconference use in
the near future might be as demanding on the network as their
current data requirements-perhaps within two years as the B factories
become operational in the U.S. and Japan and the Tevatron Run
2 begins at Fermilab. In the five years after that, high-energy
physics will need an extensive evolution of the present conferencing
system to permit effective work with gigantic data sets by extremely
distributed groups of collaborators. The new capabilities required
will almost certainly require evolution of relevant network protocols
as well as the software at the end nodes. The ESnet community
will need to have the expanded conferencing ability integrated
closely with Remote Experimental Operations, placing even more
demands on the detailed operation of the network.
Conference rooms throughout the ESnet community
are already fully booked with apparent unsatisfied demand. The
lack of both universal interoperability and ease of use continue
to pose a barrier to increased usage of this service. Commercial
providers do not seem motivated to resolve this hurdle. On a positive
note, standards have been recently developed in this area, and
low-cost commercial implementations have created the potential
for significant increased use. ESnet will need to ensure timely
and supported advancements in this area.
ESnet collaborations can be expected to make
heavy use of workstation-based videoconferencing. However, the
existing service model is a barrier to widespread use as it only
adequately supports small numbers of participants. In addition,
there is a need for a complete, readily accessible directory of
institutions and individuals who are accessible via this medium.
CROSS-CUTTING AREAS
Quality of Service Capabilities
The success of computer networking to date
has encouraged the creation of increasingly demanding network-based
applications and rising expectations about network performance.
These new applications will require stringent limits on parameters
such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and throughput.
Four factors will contribute to the growing
demands on network performance: (1) Real-time applications are
expected to permeate the network as collaboratory and remote experimentation
benefits are realized. (2) Local-area infrastructures, whose bandwidths
are currently less than ESnet, thereby serving as a bottleneck
protecting ESnet, will be upgraded, allowing greater demand on
ESnet services. (3) Lack of interbackbone connectivity will especially
affect those users of DOE facilities who are either at university
sites or not domestic. (4) Financial constraints will limit the
total bandwidth available so that (1), (2), and (3) cannot be
countered simply by additional bandwidth. A smarter mechanism
must be found to ensure needed performance.
There currently exists no management mechanism
to allocate the available resource in a manner consistent with
programmatic priorities. All other DOE resources (especially user
facilities such as the Advanced Light Source, the Advanced Photon
Source, the Tevatron, and the National Energy Research Scientific
Computing Center) have management mechanisms and implementation
schemes that allow for resource allocation and protection.
Both performance and management issues require a mechanism to provide needed network resources at appropriate times. The mechanism to accomplish this is Quality of Service (QOS). Since different resources can be required, different QOS guarantees may be required separately or in combination. For example:
In some cases, QOS may be a static condition
that might apply to all remote facility operation sessions. In
other cases, QOS might require integration with a scheduling mechanism,
so that appropriate network performance can be scheduled to coincide
with other reserved resources. One can imagine that QOS would
allow end-to-end prioritization of the network to coincide with
scheduling time at an experiment site or the reservation of other
similarly critical resources. The process of booking and then
delivering a specified QOS resource is presently unsolved and
is a major need of the ESnet program.
Non-Backbone Connectivity
The DOE community has benefited greatly from
the architecture and authorized use policies (AUPs) of ESnet.
The ESnet backbone is very responsive and generally provides more
than sufficient bandwidth between a scientist and the used facility
in those cases where they are both located on the backbone. However,
such interconnectivity and responsiveness is not typical of the
U.S. and worldwide Internet. DOE researchers who are not located
on the backbone, but rather at a U.S. university or an international
facility, are typically limited by the bandwidth and response
time of the Internet as a whole. The communities associated with
research in high-energy and nuclear physics, global climate change,
the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), environmental
restoration, and post-genome processing all have users and/or
facilities that are not directly connected to the ESnet backbone.
These require sufficient network bandwidth for dealing with very
large amounts of data in experimental, computational, or analysis
environments that require low network latency as well. Current
Internet bandwidth and latency impair DOE science in these areas.
Thus, advances are needed in end-to-end network performance and
tools with an effect beyond the current borders of ESnet.
Network Status and Diagnostic Tools for Users
Information about status, configuration, and
performance of the network is increasingly needed as applications
rely on adequate levels of bandwidth and latency. As guaranteed
performance and associated booking systems become available, booking
status and associated network usage information will also be needed.
Scalable Communications
Many of the new applications described above
will make use of shared data, whether the data consists of experimental
data for analysis, video, audio, immersive environments, or data
caching. Any one of these data transfers could require sending
large quantities of data to tens of different destinations. Efficient
use of network resources demands that distribution of data streams
like this not be duplicated any more times than absolutely necessary.
Use of a single transmission over shared portions of a route,
followed by individual distribution to final destinations, is
presently implemented for some applications, notably video, by
multicasting. Broadcast technologies (not using the Internet)
may be appropriate for simultaneous distribution of very large
data sets. Continued development of these technologies will be
needed, along with their integration into applications identified
above.
Network and Application Security
The vision espoused in this white paper, of
new network-based paradigms such as distributed computing, virtual
research groups, and telescience, depends implicitly on absolute
security. This security includes both the end-to-end security
of applications and, of course, security of the underlying network
itself. It has come to be something of an aphorism that computers,
not networks, are subject to security problems. However, the bridges,
switches, routers, and domain name servers that make up the Internet
are computers. They authenticate system (network) managers with
username-password pairs, accept Telnet connections, and are vulnerable
to exactly the same attacks that the media has reported in the
computing world.
From a user's point of view, what counts is
not the security of the underlying network, but the end-to-end
security of applications. In this context, an application can
include the remote control of an instrument or a complete research
facility. Such security includes not only the protection of the
bit stream, but also the security of the instrument, the facility,
or even people. Providing end-to-end security at the application
level involves not only securing the underlying network, it also
involves authentication and certification of users or operators,
and certification of application results.
Some of these issues have been solved in other
contexts (e.g., training certification), and in many cases tools
are beginning to appear that will allow straightforward development
of solutions (such as public key encryption). But in general,
complete solutions do not exist now and cannot be purchased as
turnkey packages from commercial vendors. The commercial marketplace
is investing in the development of secure electronic commerce
(so people can send credit card numbers over the Web), but not
to guarantee the results of a physics calculation. Thus, there
exists a gap (recognized by DOE2000) between simple encryption
of credit card numbers at one extreme, and the protection of multi-user,
multi-system, real-time sessions at the other. This gap includes
requirements for certification and authentication of users across
administrative domains, protection and certification of shared
information or results, and very high-speed encryption of real-time
data streams at OC-12 speeds or higher.
Much of the work needed is summarized in the
paper "Research & Development Priorities for Communications
and Information Infrastructure Assurance" by Huntman, Jacobsen,
Johnson, Mansur, and Baily, available at http://www-itg.lbl.gov/security/Publications/C+I_Report.html.
The paper provides rough estimates of the levels of research needed
in 13 topical areas: (1) characterization and notification of
threats; (2) detection, analysis, and prevention; (3) definition
of security architectures; (4) response, recovery, and reconstitution;
(5) advanced concepts and theory; (6) management of information
protection; (7) characterization of infrastructure required for
minimum essential services; (8) valuation of information; (9)
indication and warning; (10) cost-benefit analysis; (11) modeling
and simulation; (12) risk management; and (13) encryption technologies.
NETWORK RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
The MICS-funded network research and development
efforts are intended to create and/or enable new high performance
networking applications. Examples of their efforts to ensure scalable
networking include the improvement of network protocols and router
algorithms; the creation of tools that model, measure, and analyze
network traffic; technology that can guarantee bandwidth (e.g.,
quality of service) and associated management tools; multicasting
of data; security; and innovative techniques for the efficient
handling of World Wide Web-related traffic. ESnet is motivated
to support these efforts because such R&D underpins the future
success of networking, and the R&D program itself is a member
of the user community that ESnet is mandated to serve.
This situation presents a unique set of challenges
to the ESnet provider. On the one hand, users of the production
aspects of ESnet do not wish to have their network infrastructure
disturbed by such R&D activities. On the other hand, network
researchers must have access (at some point) to a large network
with real users as the ultimate testbed for their efforts. Such
an environment is critical to the future of ESnet and the entire
community that it serves. A full discussion of issues related
to supporting production and research traffic (and one possible
solution) can be found in "MORPHnet" by Aiken, Carlson,
Foster, Kuhfuss, Stevens, and Winkler at http://www.anl.gov/ECT/Public/research/morphnet.html. We believe such a testbed is an important requirement.
In the end, research and development must result
in products that work in the scientific environment of the ESnet
user community. Such products must be reasonably easy to use,
perhaps appearing almost shrink-wrapped. Such tools must be integrated
into the full scientific research environment and be easily maintainable.
A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH
This paper has discussed the need for a variety
of complex and advanced networking services. In order to ensure
their timely introduction and ease of use by the scientific community,
we believe that a collaborative approach to development and implementation
is needed. Most of the solutions will require close collaboration
among the ESnet staff, the scientists using the network, and the
network research and development staff. Of the applications and
infrastructure enhancements discussed above, this collaborative
approach to development will be particularly needed for remote
experimental operations, remote/shared code development, visualization,
teleconferencing/videoconferencing, quality of service, and network
status and diagnostic tools for users.
Without a collaborative and tightly coupled
approach, application and network infrastructure developments
will not be coordinated, resulting in less than synergistic efforts
and lost time. ESnet, as a network run for DOE research programs
in close consultation with the user programs, is ideally positioned
to ensure the needed collaborative developments and to work iteratively
with the programmatic users to ensure that the users get the maximum
value from the network and the improved functionality they need
as soon as possible.
We find that close cooperation between network
researchers, network service providers, and the ESnet user community
will continue to be central to the success of the DOE networking
program and the community that it benefits.