Data Logistics in Network Computing

In distributed computing environments, performance is often dominated by the time that it takes to move data over a network. In the case of data-centric applications, or Data Grids, this problem of data movement becomes one of the overriding concerns. This talk describes techniques for improving data movement in Grid environments that we refer to as 'logistics.' We demonstrate that by using storage and cooperative forwarding 'in' the network, we can improve end to end throughput in many cases. Our approach offers clear performance benefits for high-bandwidth, high-latency networks. This talk will introduce the Logistical Session Layer (LSL) and provide experimental results from that system.