EMERGE. Final report

EMERGE had two basic goals: (1) To ensure that the DOE-funded labs at UW-Madison, U of Chicago, and UIUC were connected to the DOE National Labs at the highest available speeds. EMERGE grantees were to work with DOE network engineers to achieve this goal. (2) Establish a testbed for DiffServ networking, develop monitoring, measuring and, visualization tools, develop a grid services package, cooperate with Internet2's Quality DiffServ efforts, and deploy results. For the most part these goals have been achieved, although there were some gaps. By the same token there were also some achievements that came about beyond expectations. The EMERGE testbed was established and extended to Internet2 and, via STAR TAP, to CERN. Additionally, software was developed. Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is a mechanism for supporting network Quality of Service (or QoS) whereby packets that are transmitted by a client program are marked with a priority setting that can be interpreted by the router to effect special treatment of the packet. In particular the marked packets are promoted to a higher priority queue in the router and, as a result, spend a minimum amount of time in the router. Packets that are not marked are attached to a lower priority queue, and in some cases may be dropped when congestion arises