Effective Use of Dedicated Wide-Area Networks for High-Performance Distributed Computing

Recent advances in Grid technology have made it possible to build so-called computational Grids, or simply Grids, which couple unique or rare resources that are geographically separated and span multiple administrative domains. Such Grids are invariably composed of heterogeneous networks in which, at the least, a high-performance switch accommodates intracluster messages and a separate, sometimes dedicated, high-bandwidth network serving intersite messages across the wide area. While such wide-area networks provide unprecedented bandwidth capacity and reliability, the effective utilization of these networks remains an open challenge.