NOTED: An intelligent network controller to improve the throughput of large data transfers in File Transfer Services by handling dynamic circuits

Abstract

The NOTED (Network Optimised Transfer of Experimental Data) project has successfully demonstrated the ability to dynamically provision network links to increase the effective bandwidth available for FTS-driven transfers between endpoints, such as WLCG sites, by inspecting on-going data transfers and so identifying those that are bandwidth-limited for a long period of time. Recently, the architecture of NOTED has been improved and the software has been packaged for easy distribution. These improved capabilities and features of NOTED have been tested and demonstrated at various international conferences. For example, during demonstrations at Supercomputing 2022, independent instances of NOTED at CHCERN (Switzerland) and DE-KIT (Germany) monitored large data transfers generated by the ATLAS experiment between these sites and CA-TRIUMF (Canada). We report here on this and other events, highlighting how NOTED can predict link congestion or a notable increase in the network utilisation over an extended period of time and, where appropriate, automatically reconfigure network topology to introduce an additional or an alternative and betterperforming path by using dynamic circuit provisioning systems such as SENSE and AutoGOLE.