Enterprise level cyber security requires the deployment, operation, and monitoring of many sensors across geographically dispersed sites. Communicating with the sensors to gather data and control behavior is a challenging task when the number of sensors is rapidly growing. This paper describes the system requirements, design, and implementation of T3, the third generation of our transport software that performs this task. T3 relies on open source software and open Internet standards. Data is encoded in MIME format messages and transported via NNTP, which provides scalability. OpenSSL and public key cryptography are used to secure the data. Robustness and ease of development are increased by defining an internal cryptographic API, implemented by modules in C, Perl, and Python. We are currently using T3 in a production environment. It is freely available to download and use for other projects.

High-speed wide-area networks are expected to enable innovative applications that integrate geographically distributed, high-performance computing, database, graphics and networking resources. However, there is as yet little understanding of the higher-level services required to support these applications, or of the techniques required to implement these services in a scalable, secure manner. We report on a large-scale prototyping effort that has yielded some insights into these issues. Building on the hardware base provided by the I-WAY, a national-scale asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, we developed an integrated management and application programming system, called I-Soft. This system was deployed at most of the 17 I-WAY sites and used by many of the 60 applications demonstrated on the I-WAY network. In this paper we describe the I-Soft design and report on lessons learned from application experiments. We focus on four novel concepts that we believe may have relevance to future, similar systems: point of presence machines as a means of simplifying implementation and management; scheduler proxies to integrate local schedulers to computational resource brokers; authentication proxies to provide a uniform authentication environment across multiple administrative domains; and network-aware parallel programming tools to hide heterogeneity and improve performance in heterogeneous environments. Lessons learned in building I-Soft have motivated subsequent research and development efforts in the Globus project. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

High speed wide area networks are expected to enable innovative applications that integrate geographically distributed, high performance computing, database, graphics, and networking resources. However, there is as yet little understanding of the higher level services required to support these applications, or of the techniques required to implement these services in a scalable, secure manner. We report on a large scale prototyping effort that has yielded some insights into these issues. Building on the hardware base provided by the I-WAY, a national scale asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, we developed an integrated management and application programming system, called I-Soft. This system was deployed at most of the 17 I-WAY sites and used by many of the 60 applications demonstrated on the I-WAY network. We describe the I-Soft design and report on lessons learned from application experiments.