Network Experimentation: Wavelength Disk Drives (WDD)
The circuit-oriented service on GLORIAD is designed not only to support individual science applications but to provide a test bed for network research. In the case of CANARIE’s WDD, it actually serves both needs. This is a novel concept developed by Canadian network researchers which treats a large-scale multi-wavelength network as though it were a large disk drive -with each wavelength being a separate track and special devices on the network (running the WDD software) acting as read/write heads. The hard/software injects a data record into the network as a UDP flow. When the next WDD node receives a packet it is forwarded on to the next node, resulting in packets continuously circulating around the DWDM network. CANARIE and GLORIAD will test capability of the quite different GLORIAD network to prove the concept in the ring around the northern hemisphere – while much less capacity, it is a longer path that allows a given unit capacity to carry more data. There are applications proposed from Russia for using the WDD to enable global monitoring of certain live and time-critical data streams.
