First International Conference on Networks for Grid Applications

http://www.gridnets.org

The GridNets conference series is an annual international meeting which provides a focused and highly interactive forum where researchers and technologists have the opportunity to present and discuss leading research, developments, and future directions in the Grid networking area. The objective of this event is to serve as both the premier conference presenting best Grid Networking research and a forum where new concepts can be introduced and explored.

The previous events in this series were: GridNets 2004 in San Jose (USA), GridNets 2005 in Boston (USA), GridNets 2006 in San Jose (USA). All of these events have been successful in attracting high quality papers and a wide international participation. From the first event through the fourth, we have been known as the GridNets Workshop affiliated with the IEEE BroadNets conference series. For this, our fifth event, we will convene our first meeting as a conference and in Europe. The proceedings will be published by ACM and will be available through ACM Digital Library. Best papers will be considered for publication in a special section of Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) - The International Journal of Grid Computing: Theory, Methods and Application.

Grid developers and practicioners are increasingly realising the importance of an efficient network support. Entire classes of applications would greatly benefit by a network-aware Grid middleware, able to effectively manage the network resource in terms of scheduling, access and use. Conversely, the peculiar requirements of Grid applications provide stimulating drivers for new challenging research towards the development of Grid-aware networks.

Cooperation between Grid middleware and network infrastructure driven by a common control plane is a key factor to effectively empower the global Grid platform for the execution of network-intensive applications, requiring massive data transfers, very fast and low-latency connections, and stable and guaranteed transmission rates. Big e-science projects, as well as industrial and engineering applications for data analysis, image processing, multimedia, or visualisation just to name a few are awaiting an efficient Grid network support. They would be boosted by a global Grid platform enabling end-to-end dynamic bandwidth allocation, broadband and low-latency access, interdomain access control, and other network performance monitoring capabilities.


Scope
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* Network architectures and technologies for grids
* Integration of advanced optical networking technologies into the
grid environment.
* End to end lightpath provisioning software systems and emergent
standards
* The network as a first class grid resource: network resource
information publication, brokering and co-scheduling with other Grid
resources.
* Interaction of the network with distributed data management systems.
* Network monitoring, traffic characterisation and performance analysis
* Inter-layer interactions: optical layer with higher layer protocols,
integration among layers
* Experience with pre-production optical network infrastructures and
exchange points
* Peer-to-peer network enhancements applied to the Grid
* Network support for wireless and ad hoc Grids
* Data replication and multicasting strategies and novel data transport
protocols
* Fault-tolerance, self healing networks
* Security and scalability issues when connecting a large number of sites
within a virtual organization VPN.
* Simulations
* New concepts and requirements which may fundamentally reshape the evolution
of Networks.