IEPM/PingER and IEPM/BW 


Goals
-----
The goals of the Internet End-to-end Performance Monitoring - Bandwidth
to the World (IEPM-BW) project is to develop and use a
simple, robust network and application measurements infrastructure.
This will be used to make active end-to-end application 
and network performance measurements for high 
performance network links such as are used worldwide by Grid applications 
and other academic and research (A&R) applications deployed over high 
performance network such as ESnet, Internet2 and other (A&R) networks 
in the developed world. 

This will complement the more ubiquitous, 
low impact PingER measurements that provide connectivity, loss and delay
measurements for most of the Internet connected world.

Benefits to applications
------------------------
These measurements will supplement the uses that the PingER measurements 
are used for and in particular will be critical for: 
* Providing planning information to applications, grid and 
  network planners by: 
  * Providing and understanding the achievable performance today in 
    network throughput and application (file copy & ftp) throughput. 
  * Providing historical information on growth, incremental and sudden 
    changes in performance. 
* Providing trouble shooting information to networks and users by: 
  * Indicating when there are incremental or sudden changes and the 
    time and magnitude of the changes, and providing alerts. 
  * Helping pin-point whether a performance issue is at the network layer 
    or application layer, or at some sub-component such as a disk. 
* Providing networkers and applications developers, a better understanding 
  of how networks and applications work together by providing: 
  * Validation/correlation of how network performance relates to delays 
    and loss performance (e.g. bandwidth estimators). 
* Assisting users in selecting the optimum network (e.g. windows, 
  streams, QoS) and application (e.g. compression) configuration options. 
* Identifying the critical bottlenecks such as disk, cpu speed, 
  operating system, network bandwidth etc., for high throughput 
  application performance.
* Providing a public domain network performance data base, together with 
  analyses and navigable reports from active monitoring that can be used
  for prediction and application steering, trouble-shooting, and further
  validation of various measurement techniques.

Planned interactions between other projects
-------------------------------------------
* This project has strong interactions with the HENP community:
  * SLAC is a major HENP center and the center of the BaBar collaboration.
  * The IEPM/PingER project is sponsored in part by the International
    Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) and the PingER PI is a
    member of the ICFA Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity (SCIC).
* Since January 2002, the IEPM-BW project is formally a collaboration with 
  the SciDAC funded Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG).
* The SLAC IEPM team is an integral part of the SciDAC funded INCITE project.
* We plan to evaluate:
  * The Bandwidth Estimation tools from the UCSD SciDAC funded project.
  * The GridFTP tool from the Globus project
* We will evaluate using our measurement and analysis tools with the GIMI/NIMI
  project and also intend to evaluate the Distributed Monitoring Framework
  from LBL.
* The IEPM project also collaborates with and is a member of the 
  Internet 2 End-to-End performance initiative (E2Epi), and is a 
  member of the Internet 2 High Energy and Nuclear Physics Network 
  working group.