International Aspects of this Work
Since the initial testbed for this project is a fully operational, QoS-enabled network between the University of Michigan and CERN in Geneva, the work proposed has a strong international component. Researchers at CERN, the home of the World-Wide-Web, are full partners in the preliminary QoS we are now undertaking, and we expect them to play critical roles in the work proposed here. We share a deep interest in determining how to best utilize the capabilities of the Internet in support of large-scale research projects conducted in a distributed environment.
The University of Michigan high energy physics group is a major participant in the CERN ATLAS experiment. The ATLAS collaboration consists of over 1900 physicists, from over 150 universities and institutes around the world. Michigan has the responsibility for the design and construction of a significant portion of the forward muon spectrometer for the experiment. This and other complicated ATLAS particle detector subsystems are being assembled at universities and institutes worldwide in an environment where almost daily consultations are required. High quality videoconferencing with efficient file sharing and whiteboard features is in great demand, but current collaborative tools often prove insufficient to meet our needs. When the full ATLAS detector is assembled and starts to receive beam, in approximately five years, the next challenge will be to facilitate the access of distributed researchers to the enormous amount of data generated by the experiment. We know of no other activity which will generate data in excess of the rate of the CERN ATLAS experiment. Achieving the ability to deal with such data flow rates in a distributed environment will represent a challenge for all of science and engineering, and its solution will benefit all of science and engineering. We expect that the work being proposed herein will be highly relevant to both the facilitation of the required collaboratory activities and high-speed data access.
Within the context of the large international collaboration represented by ATLAS there are numerous opportunities for providing research experiences for undergraduates in physics, engineering and computer science. The University of Michigan will continue to provide research opportunities at CERN for several of the nationally recruited, top US undergraduates. These students will work on projects associated with the building of the ATLAS and similar detectors, but will also be assigned roles in the networking R/D described herein. In this way they can work with some of the world's most outstanding network researchers, while simultaneously advancing the techniques that will facilitate the training of future generations of students. Indeed, work we have done over the past two years in the web archiving of the prestigious CERN Summer Lecture Series and in exploring the use of the Syncomat application in software training has already pointed to the potential of such applications in a regime where bandwidth reservation becomes a reality.