Tutorial IV

Description: Ultra-high performance Grid Computing and Distributed Storage applications exhibit an ever-growing appetite for networking bandwidth. As these applications grow wider in scope, this appetite also expands outwards from the campus and into metro, regional and wide-area networks. At the same time, the cost of acquisition and deployment of multi-wavelength, multi-gigabit wide-area optical networks based on DWDM and Ethernet technologies are now within reach of many research and academic users. Finally, direct access to dark fiber and emerging interoperable data-plane standards are enabling direct, user managed interconnection of campus or metro optical networks. These parallel developments are finally making possible the establishment a rich collection of truly end-toend, dedicated multi-gigabit services essentially on-demand. The promise is great. However, how are these services to be provisioned, across disparate optical technologies, vendors, and administrative domains? What technologies exist to provision, monitor and account for such services? What does the operator of a regional optical network or Grid Computing cluster need to know in order to participate in the future interconnected optical network? This tutorial seeks to provide an in-depth treatment of the current state of the art in interoperable optical control plane technologies, the practical aspects of deploying such technologies in real networks, and a roadmap for future developments in optical control planes which are expected both in the near-term and on the more distant horizon. Protocols, technologies and concepts are presented in detail, as well as concrete examples of how such technologies can help the user, administrator and operator of Grid Computing facilities provision and monitor their campus, regional and wide-area optical networks.