Status Report for SLAC/DOE IEPM Project

For October & November 1998

Coordination/Publicity/Deployment

XIWT

Warren gave a presentation titled Configuration, Results & Future Plans at the 11/5/98 XIWT IPERF group meeting at Reston. He reported that storage requirements can be reduced by more than 85% by applying "gzip" to raw data text files. Warren suggested that a short term approach for the central archive site would be to use his perl scripts instead of purchasing a vendor statistical package. This was agreed to. Warren also presented some preliminary analysis of the XIWT data.

NetPredict

Les reorganized how we (SLAC) interface with NetPredict. Coordinated with the XIWT and NetPredict to arrange a netPredict presentation at the next XIWT meeting in February in Menlo Park.

HENP Community

Les worked with Colorado State, BaBar and ESnet people to understand the abysmal performance between SLAC and Colorado State. as a result BaBar decided to place a new machine for code development at the University of Colorado instead of Colorado State.

Miscellaneous

Les discussed the desirability and feasability of producing a PingER brochure with SLAC publications and DOE. We are currently awaiting guidance from DOE on some policy issues. Les reviewed a new tool called jping developed by somebody at the Unioversity of Cologne. Exchanged several emails with the author. Les exchanged some email with Tobagi of Stanford University concerning response time required for real-time voice. Les met with 3 people from Roche Pharmeceuticals (2 from Palo Alto, the other from Switzerland) who were interested in the PingER system with the possibility of using it within Roche.

Development

Pingtable

Warren has a new setup for the pingtable program, a different setup for the configuration file and a new grouping file.

Warren implemented a statistics module for perl rather than calculating the values in the code. He also added a percentile calculation to the module and the author says he will include it in the next release.

Future of PingER

Warren has been looking at databases as part of possibly removing the dependence on SAS of the HEPNRC central archive site. This is also relevant to the XIWT archive site futures.

TimePing

Warren discovered a subtle bug in the monitoring software. The upshot is on rare occasions a returned packet gets labelled to the wrong site. Warren is working on a new version which should avoid this, and will encourage monitoring sites to upgrade when it is ready.

User Front End

Warren talked to Inxsight about Hyperbolic Tree. However, it currently appears insufficient for our needs.

Surveyor

Warren made more analysis of the Surveyor data and processed October's data. He is looking at tools to automatically generate the graphs, rather than using Excel.

XIWT

Warren also obtained data from the XIWT Monitoring effort. They are using the SLAC code at eight Monitoring sites and archiving the data in a SAS database at NIST. Warren copied the SAS files from NIST to FERMILAB and dumped the SAS data to text.

Network Snapshots

Warren extended the program to create images of the traceroute paths between sites (see Routes from Several HEP Monitoring Sites to CERN.

Warren installed Mesa (a free version of OpenGL) and the perl OpenGL module to try and extend the network snapshots to include several end nodes and do some work on visualizing the results of the monitoring.

Revised 25 November 1998
URL: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/about/status/status-1998/status-11-98.html
Comments to iepm-l@slac.stanford.edu