Shape-shifting Elephants: Multi-modal Transport for Integrated Research Infrastructure

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• Nik Sultana, Illinois Institute of Technology
• Friday 04 April 2025, 15:00-16:00
• Online (Teams link below).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Richard Mortier.

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Data Acquisition (DAQ) workloads form an important class of scientific network traffic that by its nature (1) flows across different research infrastructure, including remote instruments and supercomputer clusters, (2) has ever-increasing throughput demands, and (3) has ever-increasing integration demands—for example, observations at one instrument could trigger a reconfiguration of another instrument.

This talk describes ongoing work on developing specialized transport protocols for DAQ workloads. It introduces a new transport feature for this kind of elephant flow: multi-modality involves the network actively configuring the transport protocol to change how DAQ flows are processed across different underlying networks that connect scientific research infrastructure. This idea takes advantage of programmable network hardware that is increasingly being deployed in scientific research infrastructure. The talk describes an initial evaluation through a pilot study on a hardware testbed and using data from a particle detector.

Bio: Nik Sultana is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. He develops networking techniques to improve cybersecurity and research infrastructure. Before joining Illinois Tech, he was a post-doc at UPenn after completing his PhD at Cambridge University. In 2024 and 2023 he received VSP awards from the Universities Research Association, and in 2022 he received a Google Research Award.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar series.

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