Report on IEPM PPDG efforts for PPDG for the quarter October - June 2004

Collaboration with IEPM, Network Performance Monitoring

Web/Grid Services

We co-authored updates for and submitted the GGF NMWG recommendation entitled A Hierarchy of Network Performance Characteristics for Grid Applications and Services,

Bandwidth/Throughput measurement (IEPM-BW)

We added an IEPM-BW monitoring host at NIIT in Pakistan.

Lightweight Bandwidth Estimation

We extended ABwE to provide measure the RTT and to redesign and implement the internal protocol to allow it to be work better with typical security constraints. It is now deployed on more than 100 nodes (over 70 on PlanetLab and 40 on IEPM-BW).

Bandwidth performance anomalous events

To address the problem of too many network performance plots to manually review in order to detect important anomalies, we designed and developed an implementation of an enhanced version of the NLANR "plateau" algorithm. We created a library of interesting anomalous events from our IEPM-BW monitoring data. We evaluated the performance of the modified algorithm in terms of events captured versus false positives. We wrote a paper describing this work. It was accepted for publication through the SIGCOMM Network Trouble Shooting conference in Portland OR in September 2004. Our next steps will be to integrate this into IEPM-BW and to improve the algorithm.

PingER

We extended the PingER monitoring to include a monitoring sites at NIIT in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Palo. We extended the time series plots to add TCP throughput and also to better enable access to the data (see for example http://pinger.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/graph_pings.pl?src_regexp=slac.stanford.edu&dest_regexp=slac.stanford.edu). Much work went into updating remote hosts that were no longer pingable. In particular recovering all Australian hosts (blocked at WU, Seattle), Africa  and Alaska. We also added monitoring hosts hosts in Pakistan and Brazil and ensuring hosts were correctly entered into the database.

We attended the Internet2 "Extending the Reach of Advanced Networking - International Workshop" in Arlington VA 22 April 2004, and gave 2 talks:

• End to end Internet Performance Today
• Pinger: Methodology, Uses and Results

We prepared a report on Internet performance to Bangladesh for Professor H. Cerdeira of ICTP to present on her trip to Bangladesh.

Outreach

We worked with DESY to understand the throughput performance for various HENP applications, and with NASA to assist GLAST in achieving adequate throughput to GSFC. We worked with BaBar and IN2P3 to try new TCP stacks with real BaBar data transfers. To aid in this we set up a host at SLAC for outside users to use for high speed transport testing.

We worked with the MIT Haystack project to assist them in achieving higher throughput performance.

Advanced TCP Stack and UDP Evaluation

We worked with the developers of LTCP, H-TCP, UDT, altAIMD and FAST to get the latest kernels and code and ensure they were ported to an acceptable (from security viewpoint) version of Linux.

Proposals and Representation

• Measurement and Analysis for the Global Grid and Internet End-to-end performance (MAGGIE) - with LBNL, Internet2, PSC, and U Delaware
• INCITE Ultra – New Protocols, Tools, Security, and Testbeds for Ultra High-Speed Networking - with Rice and LANL
• TeraPaths: A QoS Enabled Collaborative Data Sharing Infrastructure for Peta-scale Computing Research with BNL, U Michigan, Stony Brook University and the University of New Mexico.
• Automatic and Continuous Buffer Tuning for Data Transfers in High-Energy Physics - with LANL

We also submitted proposals on:

• Understanding Effective Connectivity to and within Africa (AfricaPingER)  together with eJDS/ICTP, NITDA and FOSSFA - submitted  to IDRC/Canada
• Gateway to Science and Development: an Innovative Integrated Approach to the Enhancement of Science in Developing Countries with applications to Disaster Prevention and Evaluation of Natural Resources  together with ICTP, Aidworld Humanitarian ICT, CONAE, National Academy of Sciences, Kharkov, Ukraine, STAC Vietnam and the VUB, Belgium - submitted to the EU INCO
• Middleware for Optimized Network-Aware Data Dissemination (ONADD)  with GATech - submitted to NSF

We successfully set up a formal collaboration on network monitoring with the NIIT in Rawalpindi, Islamabad. A formal MOU was signed, and we are now actively working together with regular fortnightly phone meetings.

We attended:

• The three day Joint Engineering Task (JET) Force Roadmap Workshop, JLab April 13-15, 2004 and gave a talk on WAN Monitoring. The JET is a sub-group of the inter-agency Large Scale Networking (LSN). They wanted input and the creation of what is needed for high-performance networking for the next 3 years.
• The CAIDA arranged workshop on "Archiving Data for Internet Measurement Meta Data" and gave a talk SLAC Measurement Data.
• The Grid Performance Workshop UCL, May 12-13, 2004 and gave a talk on Network Monitoring today: why, how, challenges, infrastructures, federations and the Grid

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