We met while at the DARPA/DOE NGI PI meeting in McLean, VA to discuss progress on the INCITE project and to formulate goals for the coming year's research.  Over the next few months we plan the following
activities:

LANL
----
     GOALS
     - MAGNeT (Monitor for Application-Generated Network Traffic)
           - To monitor traffic immediately after being generated by
             the application (i.e., unmodulated traffic) and throughout
             the protocol stack to see how traffic gets modulated.
           - To create a library of application-generated network traces
             to test network protocols.
     - TICKET (Traffic Information-Collecting Kernel with Exact Timing)
           - To provide high-speed and high-fidelity network capture to
             support research in traffic characterization and inference
             and to provide insight into future protocol design.
           - To monitor, troubleshoot, or tune production networks.
       Coincidentally Achieved Goal:  Functionally reconfigurable.
  
     MINUTES
     - Discussed how MAGNeT and TICKET would provide information/insight
       to the traffic inference and network tomography research at Rice.
     - Alpha prototypes completed in December 2001.  Testing, evaluation,
       and internal use are underway.  Public dissemination of an alpha
       distribution will occur by the end of this fiscal year (FY02).
     - Traffic traces of our (former) 100-Mb/s FDDI backbone have been
       collected.

     - Over the next six months, anonymization and analysis of the traces
       will commence; by September 2002, we hope to have the traces
       anonymized and approval secured for public dissemination.  These
       traces are critically important to the networking community because
       current traces (http://ita.ee.lbl.gov/index.html) are either over
       low-speed media or are low utilization or both.  Our traces are over
       100-Mb/s FDDI with high utilization.  Gigabit Ethernet measurements
       will commence shortly.
  
    - LANL plans to host a Rice graduate student on internship 
      (more info below).

SLAC
----

   - SLAC has hired Jiri Navratil (jiri@slac.stanford.edu) from Prague
     University as a visting scientist to work on the INCITE
     proposal/project. He arrived at SLAC 7 January 2001.

   - SLAC is developing an ssh based infrastructure (IEPM-BW) to
     extend the PingER type measurements to enable making more
     intensive network and application measurements. Besides using
     IEPM-BW to make and compare various bandwidth estimators such as
     ping, pipechar and the DoE funded pathload, with iperf and file
     copy/transfer applications, we will also incorporate the INCITE
     "chirping" and other network active performance tools as they
     become available.  IEPM-BW will provide a stable platform to make
     and report such measurements and provide information to validate
     them.

   - SLAC is gathering a large archive of traceroute measurements from
     traceping and in the above infrastructure, and is ready to
     reformat them and make them available to Rice for tomography
     analysis.

   - SLAC will host a Rice graduate student on internship (more info
     below). She/he will learn about PingER and IEPM-BW, identify how
     best to incorpoarte the Rice tools in PingER and IEPM-BW and
     evaluate porting IEPM-BW to Rice.

   - SLAC is developing a flexible, secure, high performance file copy
     program (bbcp). This has several features (periodic throughput
     measurement reporting, ability to read from and write to memory,
     application rate limiting) that enable it to be used as a
     measurement tool in addition to a file copy tool.  Bbcp has been
     added to the IEPM-BW infrastructure.  As new features become
     available from elsewhere (e.g., netlogger, the LANL TCP tuning,
     web100) we will add them to bbcp to enable measurements of the
     effectiveness of the new features.

RICE
----

  - Rice will continue development of multiscale traffic analysis
    tools and inference algorithms, including chirp probing and active
    and passive tomography.

  - Vinay Ribeiro of Rice visited SLAC in late January 2002 to
    transfer chirp probing technology.  Rice will host a visit by Jiri
    Navratil of SLAC to bring him further up to speed on our tools.

  - Rice will place graduate students in internships at LANL and SLAC.
    LANL student will conduct multiscale analysis of traffic traces
    acquired using MAGNeT and TICKET and assist in bringing them to
    public release.  SLAC student(s) will identify how Rice probing
    and inference tools can be best integrated into the pingER and
    bbcp tools.  On return, SLAC student will create a pingER NG
    installation at Rice.

  - Rice will investigate how our dynamic bandwidth estimation tools
    can be applied in the context of SLAC's new bbcp parallel remote
    file copy utility.

  - With SLAC, Rice will use pingER and bbcp tools to test and
    validate our analysis and inference algorithms on the real
    Internet.

All three groups plan to get together in spring for an informal research workshop.