SENSE in Practice: Quantifying the End-to-End Benefits of Intent-Based Bandwidth Reservation for Exascale Science Workflows

The escalating demands of scientific collaborations necessitate advanced networking for deterministic, secure, and orchestrated services across multiple administrative domains. The Software-Defined Network for End-to-end Networked Science at the Exascale (SENSE) paradigm addresses these needs through intent-based networking and multi-domain orchestration. This paper evaluates SENSE’s performance on a comprehensive multi-domain testbed, including GNA-G AutoGOLE, the National Research Platform (NRP), FABRIC, and production LHC CMS infrastructure. Our results demonstrate that intent-based service requests are successfully translated into network configurations, with average provisioning times of 183 seconds for simple services and 290 seconds for complex multi-domain workflows. Performance monitoring confirms that SENSE maintains guaranteed bandwidth allocations, enabling higher-priority data flows to complete significantly faster than in best-effort scenarios. This capability transforms the network into a first-class schedulable resource, optimizing scientific workflows by prioritizing data criticality and moving beyond best-effort limitations to achieve predictable and efficient data movement for data-intensive scientific endeavors.