PingER phone meeting between HEPNRC & SLAC 9/8/99

Rough notes by Les Cottrell
Attendees: Les Cottrell, Warren Matthews - SLAC; Bill Lidinsky and Shiqui He- HEPNRC.
Comments in bold face italics are action items.

Old action items

NEPNRC hire

An offer has been made to a FNAL internal employee to join HEPNRC to work 50% of the time on PingER related projects. It is not yet determined when he will move from his current job to HEPNRC. Bill hopes to know the answer to this last question by the end of this week.

Abstract for CHEP00

Bill agreed to respond on the abstract by close of business 9/9/99. If nothing is heard then SLAC will proceed uni-laterally. Warren has put together a brief abstract:

How No Collisions Makes Better Physics: All you ever wanted to know 
about achieving your Wide-Area-Networking Goals.

Internet connectivity is critical infrastructure for modern HEP 
experiments, computing goals can only be achieved with reliable, 
fast connections between geographically separate regions.

In this talk we will discuss past and future performance, how the 
requirements of HEP can be met and how we will know. We will examine
several networks and review several monitoring projects.

We aim to detect the recipe for success.

Les also put together a rough outline:

Active End-to-end Internet Performance Measurements in HEP & Elsewhere: 
when no collisions makes better physics

Why we care
        Distance independent collaborations
Methodology, deployment
Validation
        thruput, http
Comparison with other Active IEPM projects
Results
        Long term thruput trends
        Comparisons between networks
        Importance of routing
        Monitoring of major HEP collaborations

Beacons

Shiqi reported that he had installed the new beacon sites at HEPNRC following the last meeting (i.e. around 8/19/99). Les reported that 10 of the 18 PingER sites appear to have updated to the new beacons sites. He will send email to the administrators to try and get more to update.

SAS issues

HEPNRC have ordered the new NT SAS server, it will arrive before the end of September. Warren said he had talked to SAS and they informed him that they will not sell the JDBC client separate from the rest of the $18K complete SAS package. Without the JDBC client it is unclear how to access SAS data remotely (e.g. by an SQL query). Possibly one could write a thin proxy that would run on the SAS server and respond to the remote client's JDBC request, read the data from SAS and provide the data in the appropriate format back to the client. Shiqu said SAS had recently demonstrated a Java applet that would allow access to the SAS database, however it was very slow. Bill agreed to contact SAS to understand their relevant offerings and to get an idea of how on e might proceed if we need to roll our own client and proxy.

Next Meeting

There will be a phone meeting on Wednesday 6th October at 2:30pm PDT.

Revised 8 September 1999
URL: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/about/status/mtg/pinger-19990908.html
Comments to iepm-l@slac.stanford.edu