Transport Protocol and Security Extensions to GridFTP

The data distribution and management functions for large-scale collaboration face significant challenges as emerging data-intensive applications necessitate efficient and secure transport across geographically dispersed locations. GridFTP is a powerful solution that has been developed to address these transport requirements for Grid computing, particularly within the Department of Energy. Considerable improvements to the speed and functionality of the GridFTP toolset could be achieved if next-generation hardware-accelerated technologies were incorporated. To that end, this project will develop significant extensions to GridFTP that will incorporate powerful protocol offload engines. These protocol offload engines are capable of processing at all layers, from the physical layer to the application layer (OSI layers 1-7), and are tailored specifically to accelerate GridFTP. They will reside on a custom Network Interface Controller (NIC) card, thus severely reducing the software-induced bottlenecks associated with protocol processing and enabling secure, wire-rate transfer of data at 10 ¿ 40 Gb/s. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The system should be especially well suited for transferring and managing large data sets across geographically dispersed grids and supercomputers on ultra-high-speed networks such as the UltraScience Net