HENP Roadblocks Working Group Report V1.0
July 9, 2001
Atlas Networking Group
Thomas J Hacker
(hacker@umich.edu)

The general charge to the working group was to develop a clear, but generalized list of issues or concerns regarding their specific area of focus relating to the overall objective of providing the best possible environment for HEP/NP science. If possible, both working groups were to suggest possible courses of action to address issues and concerns that are raised.

A working group was established by consensus of the attendees to address "roadblocks" that were impeding progress in achieving the goals of the Atlas project. A roadblock is more precisely defined as:

Something, such as a situation or condition, that prevents further progress toward an accomplishment.

The overall mission to be achieved, abstracted from report from the US LHC Common Projects Working Group Networking is to:

Help ensure that the required national and international network infrastructures, monitoring tools and facilities, and collaborative systems, are developed and deployed in time to meet the needs of the US LHC Program, as well as the HEP community.

The working group identified a set of goals to be addressed by the working group, and identified a set of specific roadblocks for each goal that were impeding progress toward achieving that specific goal.

The first goal identified by the group was as an overarching goal was to have a network that delivers a bandwidth to scientists to help them do science. The roadblocks identified by the group that are impeding progress towards achieving this goal are:

• Existence of the "road" - national and regional networks Is there a sufficiently provisioned national and regional networking infrastructure that can deliver the bandwidth, latency, and availability minimally necessary for successful use?
• No coherent strategy for a global infrastructure
• No plan for meeting the network bandwidth needs of community
• U.S. approach is fragmented
• Does the local campus or organization have a sufficiently provisioned network connection to the backbone?
• Are all the network connections between network providers suffficent?

The actions recommended to address this goal are to:

• Communicate concerns to appropriate organizations
• Address funding issues
• Work with GriPhyN, PPDG and EU DataGrid to ensure that the US and global network infrastructures are meeting the programmatic needs of scientists accessing PetaByte-scale virtual data.
• Existence or inadequacy of desktop and campus backbone network capability. Are there efforts being made address this?
• Work with the national and international network engineering staffs, including ESNet, Internet2, STARTAP, the US-CERN link, and other expert groups, to ensure that the existing major network links relevant to ATLAS, CMS and other HEP major programs may be used to their full capability.