HENP Special Interest Group Charter

The HENP Special Interest Group is composed of scientists, engineers, local network and backbone network experts, collaborating to achieve the high levels of routine end-to-end network performance and reliability required for present and future experimental programs in high energy and nuclear physics. (Click here for Word version of Charter.)

Mission

• To help ensure that the required national and international network infrastructures, monitoring tools and facilities, and support for collaborative systems, are deployed and developed on an ongoing basis, in time to meet the requirements of the major HENP experimental programs, as well as the HENP community at-large .
• To encourage that the Group's targeted developments are applied broadly, in other fields, within and beyond the bounds of scientific research.

Technical Objectives and Activities

Work with the Internet2 and other national and international network engineering staffs, as well as expert groups, to ensure that the existing major networks relevant to HENP may be used to their full capability (including high speed data transmission and state of the art multimedia and interactive applications), through the execution of the following activities:

1. Support the development and deployment of toolkits, documentation and guidelines for best practices so that existing expert knowledge and tools for high throughput data transfers, packet loss and throughput-limit monitoring, and collaborative systems are widely known.
   
2. Support the deployment of testing and monitoring tools and applications, link and site instrumentation, and a standard methodology, in association with the Internet2 End-to-End Initiative, so that all of HENP's major network paths can be adequately monitored, and used at full capability.
   
3. Share information and provide advice on the configuration of routers, switches, PCs and network interfaces, and network testing and problem resolution, to achieve high performance over local and wide area networks in production.
   
4. Work with the staffs of the international (Tier0), national (Tier1), regional (Tier2) and local (Tier3) Grid facilities as needed, to verify high throughput and network responsiveness, in association with the Grid projects, and for new collaborative interactive systems.
   
5. Work with the sites, expert networking teams at national labs, universities, and computational science centers, to develop and expand on a knowledge base for high performance networks. Develop a support base of knowledgeable engineers, technicians and scientists to assist with the above goals.
   
6. Work to identify and track the programmatic network needs of the current and future generation HENP program: quantitatively in terms of bandwidths, throughputs and computer system capabilities required to provide the needed overall performance; and qualitatively in terms of the features and characteristics of existing and new systems needed for efficient distributed data access, processing and analysis as well as remote collaboration.
   
7. Work with GriPhyN, PPDG, EU DataGrid, iVDGL and other Grid projects to ensure that the US and global network infrastructures are satisfying the programmatic needs of scientists using grids.
   
8. Work with the network engineering staffs of the US and global research networks to help define the requirements and operational procedures for a Global Grid Operations Center, and mission-specific Grid Operations Centers as needed, so that the ensemble of research networks is able to work efficiently and provide the high level of capability required.
   
9. Investigate emerging new network technologies, such as optical switching and lambda-based network infrastructure, for applicability and potential use in support of the HENP program. If appropriate, develop a strategic plan for coordinated deployment of these technologies among HENP sites.

Context and Motivation for the Special Interest Group

The major experimental programs of High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) each bring together hundreds to thousands of physicists from across the globe to build complex detectors that probe the basic constituents of matter, nature's fundamental forces, and the origin and character of our universe. These experiments present unprecedented challenges in networking, data processing, storage, and access. The challenges arise from the need to process, distribute and analyze large volumes of raw and processed complex data generated by the experiments, rising from hundreds of Terabytes of compacted binary data per year now, to hundreds of Petabytes per year within the next decade. The exploration of the data, using new analysis techniques and software developed continuously by physics teams spread over several continents, is the process driving the physics discoveries. The need to collaborate on a truly worldwide scale is thus another new, mission-critical challenge.

Scientists in other fields of science and engineering, from astrophysics to genomics to seismology, face network-distributed data-intensive problems of a generally similar nature, with a rapidly expanding scale and scope.

In order to meet these challenges, the HENP community is working in close collaboration with leading computer scientists to develop and construct "tiered" Petascale Data Grids. These distributed systems integrate major computing and data handling facilities serving several nations, tens to hundreds of regional and local facilities, and thousands of desktops. Achieving the seamless use of HENP's global Grids, to meet the needs of frontier science across an ensemble of land-based and transoceanic networks of varying capability, requires the collaborative work of network engineers, discipline scientists and computer scientists alike. This is reflected in the composition and charge to this Special Interest Group.

Recently it has been realized that developing these systems for HENP and other fields, and solving the associated networking and distributed system problems, could have profound and far reaching benefits: for research, education, industry and commerce; and for the formation of the future Internet. This has given added impetus to the Special Interest Group, whose work is mission-critical for the achievement of HENP's scientific goals.