What's New ?

IEPM Home Page IEPM Site Map Network Monitoring PingER IEPM Papers and Presentations

• IEPM - Bandwidth to the World project. This is a new proposal to evolve from the PingER lightweight network measurement activities into more intense network and application monitoring for links that utilize high performance networks (e.g. ESnet, Internet2 and Academic & Research network) and applications such as Grid enabled bulk data replication.
• SC 2001 Bansdwidth Challenge This year the IEPM group will be participating the the SC2001 Bandwidth Challenge. The goal will be to achieve high throughput to over 20 sites worldwide from the SLAC/FNAL booth at SC2001 in Denver in November 2001. At the same time we hope to explore the impact of the QBone Scavenger Service (QBSS) on traffic management on a high speed congested link. For more on this see the Bandwidth to the World proposal.
• Bulk Throughput. High performance transport of data over the network is critical to the success of HENP and other fiels' applications such as file replication for data grids. As part of the Particle Physics Data Grid efforts and for the BaBar experiment, we have been conducting measurements of both network (TCP using iperf) and application (file transfer using bbcp) throughputs from SLAC to various sites. This is to understand what is achievable, how to go about achieving it (large windows, multiple parallel streams etc.), what the impact is on other users of the network or the hosts etc. For more on this start at: Bulk throughput measurements.
• QBSS. Differentiated Services (DiffServ) are cited in terms of increasing performance by labelling packets with "expedited forwarding (forward me first)" and "assured forwarding (drop me last)". However, IEPM is leading the way in making use of the QBone Scavenger Service (qbss) being developed by the Qbone group in Internet2. This form of DiffServ is used to provide less than best effort. Huge data transfer will be trickled across the network and will back down whenever other applications need the bandwidth. Go to the qbsss webpage.
• WEB100. The modern high capacity networks used by research groups have raised expectations amongst scientist. Often these expectations are not reached. One of the reasons for failure is the TCP/IP stack on the end-node that manages the networking for the applications is not tuned to make full use of the resources. Work at SLAC and elsewhere has attempted to understand how to tune the parameters to improved performance. Now the IEPM group is working with the web100 project to understand this fully and optimise TCP performance. Go to the web100 webpage.
• HENP Networking Group. IEPM is a the first monitoring group to become involved with the HENP Networking Group, within the applications area of Internet2. This group will develop new understanding of what is required for the HENP community and work closely with the Internet2 End-to-end Initiative.
• Grid Forum. IEPM has become involved in monitoring for the grid and is a founder member of the Global Grid Forum Network Performance Working Group. Activities are under way to implement the Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA) and integrate pingER monitoring with other tools to create a monitoring framework for the particle physics data grid (PPDG).

Other achievements are detailed in the monthly report, see Recent IEPM Status Reports and Meeting Notes.

For a more detailed site map of the iepm webpages, see the guided tour.

Revised September 30, 2001
URL: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/about/new.html
Comments to iepm-l@slac.stanford.edu