EAGER: Designing the OSN Software Platform

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This EAGER award will explore the software platform needed to power a radically new type of infrastructure, viz., a national-scale open storage network. The project team will work closely with the Open Storage Network (OSN) project team, located at Johns Hopkins University and the four NSF Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs, who will acquire and operate the hardware component of the OSN. The project will engage in multidisciplinary collaboration among computer scientists, software and network engineers, and application scientists, to develop and prototype the software. The goal is to learn rapidly about the key requirements placed on the software platform in preparation for the next phase of OSN, which would involve the deployment of a nationwide, production-quality storage network with hundreds of petabytes of fault tolerant, distributed storage, interconnected via high-speed networks. The focus of this project is on the design and development of the OSN software platform and corresponding programming interfaces, to ensure that they can be accessed effectively and easily by three groups of users: OSN system administrators, who are required to monitor and manage OSN operations; application developers, who develop innovative applications that build upon OSN capabilities; and researchers, educators, students, and others, who use the OSN either directly or through such applications. This grant explores and develops rapid prototypes of the software stack for nodes of the Open Storage Network (OSN), with a view to answering exploratory questions vital to the eventual success of a national-scale implementation, such as: -What are the use cases that should inform the design of a system like OSN? -What are the mechanisms that will be required to administer and manage a system like OSN? -What value-added services should be provided on top of a core OSN fabric to support application use cases? -What sustainability models can be used to expand and sustain OSN? -What are the implications of OSN use cases and workflows for OSN infrastructure at the storage system level? To provide a foundation for this exploratory, rapid prototyping effort the EAGER team will work with the OSN team to establish a functional storage testbed with software that is sufficiently robust to give users confidence and enable use in real scientific applications, which will be the test cases for this testbed. That work will involve deployment of existing software such as Ceph and Globus. However, that work is just preparatory to addressing the exploratory questions listed above, which are the focus of the proposed project. The work proposed here will prototype an initial version of the OSN Software Platform that provides an initial set of authentication, authorization, data movement, and data sharing capabilities to support OSN experimentation and validation. The project will also work towards the design and development of a more full-featured OSN Software Platform for its next version, based upon community input, and backed up by early experimental studies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.