Report on IEPM PPDG efforts for PPDG for the quarter April-June 2003

Report prepared by Les Cottrell, July 12, 2003

Collaboration with IEPM, Network Performance Monitoring

Web Services

We have co-authored the Global Grid Forum (GGF) Network Monitoring Working Group (NMWG) document on a A Hierarchy of Network Performance Characteristics for Grid Applications and Services and the Schema/Profile for Network Performance Measurements for Grids. As part of validating the ideas we have installed Globus3, studied the GGF OGSA/OGSI documents, created an OGSA Web Services using Apache Axis and Tomcat. Following this we implemented web services clients and servers to access network measurement data from the Arena database. The work is being documented. Warren attended and gave a presentation at the UCL workshop on IEPM-BW. Les attended GGF8 and gave a presentation on An Implementation of the NMWG Profile Document.

Data Presentation and Visualization

We met with Iosif Legrand, the developer of Mona Lisa, and following this installed it at SLAC, and built interfaces to the IEPM-BW and PingER data. We are now working with developer to make the Mona Lisa web services OGSA compliant.

We are working on extracting and displaying useful information on route changes from our traceroute records.

PingER

PingER is now widely recognized as the most extensive source of world-wide active network monitoring data. It is being heavily used to assist in quantifying the Digital Divide. We gave a presentation on Quantifying the Digital Divide to the ICFA/SCIC. We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Electronic Journal Distribution Service (eJDS) at the ICTP in Trieste. They are geared top facilitate access to current scientific literature for free for devloping nations, and so are very interested in the Digital Divide. We have been working with a team from UT Austin to look at the PingER data from an economic viewpoint, We worked with contacts to restart the monitoring to hosts in Kazakhstann, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. We presented a talk on Quantifying the Digital Divide at the Internet2 Reaching Collaborators in Hard to Network Parts of the World Interest Group.

User access to the PingER data has been improved by working with FNAL to add a new download feature to the PingER graphs.

High speed networking

We were awarded first place award for the CENIC Road to Ten Gigabits: Biggest, Fastest in the West. We attended the ceremony ro receive the award and gave a presentation on the work.

Les appeared live on TechTV's Screen Saver show to talk for about 10 minutes about the Internet2 Land Speed REcord set up with Caltech, CERN, LANL and SLAC. We also prepared and made an invited presentation at the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) on Achieving Record Speed Trans-Atlantic End-to-end Throughput.

Advancerd TCP STack Evaluation

We have a summer intern student for 4 months and are tooling up to make new comparisons of advanced TCP stacks, as part of this we created an RPM of the Web100 patch and applied it for the latest version of Linux. This will enable us to test HS-TCP.

We started discussions with Aleksander Kuzmanovic on a new low priority TCP stack he is developing. WE have also made contact with other researchewrs devloping advanced TCP stacks. The intent is to evaluate ikt and compare with other advanced TCP stacks such as FAST, Scalable TCP and HS TCP as well as with teh standard New Reno stack.

We gave a presentation on a new quicker version of iperf, developed at SLAC, that uses Web100 to reduce the test time by 90% at the Internet2 Joint Techs workshop.

Proposals

We worked with Caltech and others to submit an NSF/EIN proposal (UltraLight) to build, maintain and use an optical testbed for testing TCP stacks, new applications etc. WE also worked with SSRL and the University of Buffalo on another NSF proposal.

To provide continuity for the IEPM-BW project we have put together a collaboration of people from SLAC, LBNL, ICIR, ANL and PSC and are developing the MAGGIE proposal to develop both continuous and on-demand high speed end-to-end performance monitoring.

IPv6

Following the renewed interest in IPv6 to support large numbers of IP addresses that will be needed as more and more objects (phones, soldiers, mines, personal devices etc.) are networked, we revived our IPv6 monitoring effort. The first steps were to revive the IPv6 subnet and set up DNS and NTP on the IPv6 nodes, followed by installing the PingER6 monitoring software. We are also preparing a presentation for the Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop in August at Lawrence, Kansas.

Reports

We prepared and sent in to DoE/MICS a report on Significant Accomplishments in the Network Research Program for FY2003 . At the request of DoE we led the team from LBNL, CAIDA and NLABR to author and present a report on The State of Network Monitoring and Analysis in the US to the government inter-agency Large Scale Networking group.