Internet2 Projects
WAIL is a one-of-a-kind facility for conducting network and distributed systems
research. The vision is to be able to recreate instances of the Internet from
end-to-end-through-core in a laboratory environment. What sets WAIL apart from
other network test beds is that real IP networking hardware is used to create
the network configurations used in tests.
The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Lab at UW-Madison helps to develop and
deploy technology to make the Internet more secure, more reliable, and easier to
use. A PKI ties together information in digital certificates, databases, and
directories, enabling reliable authentication and authorization across
organizational boundaries. Widely deployed PKI-enabled middleware is essential
for the Internet to become more secure and effective. PKI offers great promise
for addressing issues in privacy, data confidentiality, data integrity and
reliable digital signatures. AT&T is providing $100,000 to help set up labs at
UW and Dartmouth. The Internet2 PKI Labs will develop technology that is more
scalable, open, secure and private. With it, enterprises can better secure
access to information and services over the Internet. Close collaboration with
Internet2 corporate partners will help promote rapid deployment in the global
Internet.
The Condor Project is working to develop, implement, deploy, and evaluate
mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large
collections of distributively owned computing resources. The Condor Team has
been building software tools that enable scientists and engineers to increase
their computing throughput. Condor is a specialized workload management system
for compute-intensive jobs. Like other full-featured batch systems, Condor
provides a job queueing mechanism, scheduling policy, priority scheme, resource
monitoring, and resource management. Users submit their serial or parallel jobs
to Condor, Condor places them into a queue, chooses when and where to run the
jobs based upon a policy, carefully monitors their progress, and ultimately
informs the user upon completion.
This Condor installation has served as a major source of computing cycles to
UW-Madison faculty and students. In the Computer Sciences Department, Condor
manages more than 1000 workstations. According to usage statistics on a typical
day, Condor delivers more than 650 CPU days to UW researchers. Additional Condor
installations have been established over the years across our campus and the
world. Hundreds of organizations in industry, government, and academia have used
Condor to establish compute installations ranging in size from a handful to well
over one thousand workstations.
