NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, July 2002

• Entire NLANR/DAST staff is engaged with contacting iGrid2002 demo teams in order to offer support. Some have responded, and a few asked for direct support. Direct support of applications will include (but not be limited to) Web100 kernel installation, TCP performance monitoring, multicast beacon support, and demo application participation from NCSA with the NLANR/DAST Immersadesk.
• Steve Engelhardt put out a new draft for the Design of the end-user network testing framework (RANT) and it was read and commented on by the rest of the staff. Steve is revising the draft to reflect ideas passed along by the group. Tanya Brethour has completed a first draft of the User Interface, and that was featured in a talk at the Boulder Joint Techs conference by the I2 End-to-End staff. Research assistant Feng Qin has been prototyping code for the project, doing proof of concept things to smooth the way for the production coding.
• John Estabrook had a successful demo run with the Immersadesk in Seattle at the ThinkQuest event there. ThinkQuest is a series of workshops aimed at the K-12 teacher and administrator about the future of education. They paid all Idesk shipping and travel expenses for Estabrook. A networked application from Virginia Tech, run by John Weinrich and Ron Kriz, was highlighted.
• Jim Ferguson and John Towns attended and participated in Global Grid Forum 5 and HPDC-11, which ran from July 21-26. Towns is Chair, and Ferguson is Secretary, of the Grid User Services Research Group of the GGF, who are currently pushing four different documents through the GGF documents acceptance process. Towns and Ferguson are also active participants in a few other working and research groups each. As usual, the side conversations were as important as the scheduled working group meetings and many contacts were made with collaborators and future collaborators.
• Steve Engelhardt continues to work with application developers with the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array (BIMA) project. In July, he worked on getting the BIMA queue manager to work with Apache AXIS, the latest Java SOAP code
• Research assistant Yanli Tong has made excellent progress (with the shepherding of Estabrook and Ferguson) on her project to adapt the NLANR/DAST auto-tuning FTP code to be a "plug-in" for the GridFTP project. Much code has been written.
• 199 ongoing projects were reviewed and 14 new projects added to the Advanced Application Database. The AAD is currently featured on the Applications section of the Internet2 web site. A dialogue box with the NLANR/AAD logo is there over a Search box that will search the AAD. http://apps.internet2.edu/ Ester Soriano, Jim Ferguson and John Towns worked with the I2 staff on the accompanying article featuring the NLANR/AAD.
• New full time positions with NLANR/DAST opened with receipt of grant funds. Resumes are coming in and now being reviewed.