The measurements include traceroutes at 10 minute intervals, pings and capacity/throughput. To reduce load on the network and remote sites being monitored we are mainly using the lightweight ABwE/abing monitoring tool developed by the INCITE project. It provides rough estimates of capacity, cross traffic and available bandwidth while using only 20 packets. For monitoring between the monitoring sites we are also using the more intensive iperf tool. We are looking at an alternative to iperf to get achievable throughput measurements. This uses thrulay a new tool from Stanislav Shalunov of Internet2. This appears to be easier to control than iperf. It has been installed at SLAC and initial experiences are positive. We need to compare and contrast the results from iperf and thrulay before we deploy it elsewhere, We presented a status report on DWMI at the Internet2 Joint Techs meeting in Salt Lake City in February.
We are working on providing maps of the IEPM-BW deployment. We are also working with Iosif Legrand of CERN/Caltech to decide how to provide MonALISA access to the data via a graphical web interface. With the new version of IEPM-BW (version 3), the web services access to the data no longer works. We will be reviving this to enable application access to the data.
We need to work with BNL to understand how we can monitor and compare MPLS/QoS circuits with shared best-effort circuits.
Two members of the IEPM team visited NIIT in Pakistan for two weeks each, to further the MAGGIE-NS collaboration that is building and extending tools to provide sustainable monitoring of the Internet.
We have set up PingER monitoring sites in Pakistan and India which will assist in providing information about performance within, between and from Developing Regions, assisting the exiting measurements from Brazil and Russia. We put together a presentation for the World Bank on Quantifying the Digital Divide
At Sunnyvale we have installed an UltraLightCisco 6509 router switch, which is connected to the 10GE UltraLight circuit and has access to StarLight and Caltech. In addition, from BaBar, we have loaned four SunFire V20Z's each with two 1.8GHz AMD Opteron 64bit cpus. Two of these have been configured with Red Hat EL 4 Linux and SLAC owned Neterion/S2io 10GE Network Interface Cards (NICs). These have been installed at Sunnyvale and connected to the Cisco 6509. To enable remote management at Sunnyvale we have also installed remote power cycling control, console access via a terminal server, and 10Mbps management access to the hosts. We have exchanged accounts with other UltraLight sites at CalTetch, CENIC-LA and StarLight and are currently working on optimizing the configurations to achieve optimum throughput between the V20zs. Currently the throughput achieved at Sunnyvale is 5.7Gbits/s for the Neterion NICs. At SC2004 we achieved 7.4Gbit/s with 2.4GHz V20zs and S2io and Chelsio TOE NICs. We need to understand the discrepancy.
The remaining two V20z's are still at SLAC. They are being configured with Chelsio TCP Offload Engine (TOE) 10GE NICs loaned from Chelsio. We are also working with Sun to install Solaris 10 on one of the hosts so we can evaluate its performance for 10GE.
Next week (4-8 April 2005) USN plans to make the physical installation of the UltraScienceNet at Sunnyvale. Initially the USN circuits will support IP traffic so we will plug it into the Cisco 6509.
We published a paper on Characterization and Evaluation of TCP and UDP-based Transport on Real Networks at the Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks in Lyon in February 2005.