There are three fundamental technological choices to address when finding solutions for Data Intensive Applications:
• Packet switching vs. Circuit switching
• Public Internet vs. Private connection (shared vs. dedicated)
• L3 vs. L1 functionalities
The obvious solutions use existing technologies like L3, routing mechanisms, and the public internet for large data sets of e-Science research. However, limitations embedded in these technologies make these solutions less effective. In the age-old question of using packet switching vs. circuit switching, historically packet switching won. L1 circuit switching to limited address space is more effective than L3 packet switching to large address space. The original Internet Design Principles provides a different set of criteria for low bandwidth supply, and does not perform optimally in e-Science. Routing and L3 works well for small packets and short durations, but lose their effectiveness for large data sets and long durations. In L3 mechanisms, look-ups are performed for large data streams. This is no longer required when the destination is known in advance, saving billions of identical forwarding decisions in large data sets. On the shared public Internet, fairness is important and therefore considered in networking protocols. In dedicated private network, fairness is not an issue.
