APPLICATIONS

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $3.7 million to the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST) to continue providing technical support, tools development, and community education to the NSF-funded high-performance networking and applications communities. The award is a three-year extension of the original NLANR/DAST program, which began in 1997 to help scientists and engineers make the most of distributed applications designed to run on high-performance grids. The NLANR/DAST team is located at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is one of three NLANR teams. NLANR is an NSF-funded collaboration that provides technical, engineering, and traffic analysis support for NSF's High Performance Connections sites and for projects involving NSF-funded high-performance networking infrastructure. NLANR/DAST supports researchers who use the resources of high-performance networks and the middleware-based grid environments that depend on these networks. The team members provide aid at every level of an application developer's project. They maintain tools for measuring network performance, build distributed applications, and assist others developing distributed applications. The team has offered training and demonstrations across the country on NLANR-developed tools such as Iperf (http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/), and Netlog (http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/#netlog). "We welcome the challenges of working with researchers to harness high-performance networks and grid-enabled computing environments and of building on our strong history of assisting scientists and engineers," said John Towns, principal investigator for NLANR/DAST and director of NCSA's Scientific Computing division. "Our continued activities in the development of tools, applications support, training, and community-building will help bring emerging grid technologies to the academic research community to solve a whole new class of scientific problems." The next stage of NLANR/DAST will include developing and extending tools for both high-bandwidth optical networks and low-bandwidth wireless networks. The new award will also allow NLANR/DAST to evolve from a team focused on specific projects into an organization that supports network engineers and application scientists worldwide who use high-performance networks for science and engineering. In addition, the team plans to expand outreach efforts among groups newly funded by the NSF so that these groups know how important networking technologies are to their work. Jim Ferguson, co-principal investigator and day-to-day manager of NLANR/DAST activities at NCSA said, "as communities of users develop to take advantage of grids in scientific and engineering disciplines, NLANR/DAST is uniquely positioned to assist in the implementation and usage of new middleware as it becomes available." For more information, see www.nlanr.net or www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.