Network Integrated Processing

Investigators: Joseph B. Evans, Douglas Niehaus, Victor S. Frost, David W. Petr

This research will develop methods of fully integrating general purpose processing and memory elements with gigabit local and wide area networks. A distinguishing aspect of this work is the innovative use of the virtual circuit capabilities of B-ISDN services provided by asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks to provide connectivity, in combination with new approaches to protocols, buffering, and caching. We call this approach Network Integrated Processing (NIP), since it eliminates the dichotomy between the processor and the network.

The NIP architectural approach creates a distributed computation environment within which:

  • components of a computation can exchange data across thousands of miles as easily as they can across a room,
  • distributed computational architectures using tens or hundreds of nodes from a pool potentially containing millions are dynamically composed and used,
  • additional resources can be attached at any network location while still providing uniform access and thus provide support for scaling.

    • Creating the NIP architecture will advance the state of the art in several areas, including:

  • reduction of latency associated with distributed computations by reducing the overhead of the network-processor interface and by developing protocols for buffering and caching data which take advantage of the unique properties of the ATM interconnection facilities,
  • creation of a distributed computing environment supporting the description and compilation of a computation as a set of communicating components that can be mapped onto the processing architecture composed from the pool of NIP processing elements,
  • methods for rapid and reliable estimation of computation component properties, and binding of components and data to NIP resources.

    • The proposed research will be driven and validated by its application to selected problems from the MAGIC gigabit testbed and DREN testbed community. We envision the project having three phases: design and analysis, prototype implementation, and performance measurement and analysis.

    Related Information

  • MAGIC Gigabit Testbed
  • ACTS ATM Internetwork
  • Rapidly Deployable Radio Network
  • GBN '95 Presentation

    • Send comments to Joseph B. Evans, <evans@eecs.ku.edu> .