NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, November 2002

(Unless otherwise noted, all persons mentioned in this report get part or all of their funding from the NLANR/DAST cooperative agreement.)

a. Activities related to network tool development for end users

• In the weeks ahead of SC2002, Tanya Brethour, Steve Engelhardt and Feng Qin worked furiously to integrate the parts of The Advisor they had been working on into a coherent package for showing for the first time. This was a good exercise in getting the parts of the project together, and further versions will be built on the work they have done. The live demo with a "expert" GUI worked as designed on the floor at SC2002 for a small number of interested attendees.
• Kevin Gibbs has continued Iperf development toward a release of version 1.7 early in 2003. An interim release was done to give to engineers at SC2002 for use at SCInet. There has been increased traffic on the iperf-users email list, with many suggestions mixed in with the questions regarding the tool. New features added by Kevin so far include summing multi-threaded tests, plus setting up two-way tests initiated and reported on one side of the test.

b. Activities related to existing network and Grid middleware infrastructure development and deployment projects.

• John Towns connected up with Andrew Chein's research group at UCSD who are responsible for some modifications to GridFTP, a file transfer utility that is being used by grid users. In particular, they are modeling expected performance of GridFTP on the TeraGrid. DAST will send the latest plug-in code featuring automatic buffer tuning to this group for testing. Good results from this test would indicate that the NLANR/DAST autotuning plug-in should be used by default for the TeraGrid installations of GridFTP. In addition, good results are a strong argument for making the code a part of the GridFTP code base in future releases.
• At SC2002, Mitch Kutzko (along with Tony Rimovsky) met with Bob Olson (Argonne N.L.), a key customer and tester of the NLANR Multicast Beacon. One outcome of the meeting was that Olson was convinced that the latest bugs he had been seeing in the system were *not* due to the Beacon code, but due to some undiagnosed problem in the network locally near his server machine at Argonne.

c. Collaboration with communities of Grid (distributed resource) researchers and other advanced applications with the goal of developing expertise and capabilities within each community.

• John Towns, Jim Ferguson, Tanya Brethour and Steve Engelhardt travelled to the University of Wisconsin - Madison to meet with the Condor group and Professor Miron Livny. Discussions centered around TCP autotuning code developed at NLANR/DAST being useful for Condor, as well as some aspects of the Condor code base being possibly useful for DAST's Network Performance Advisor.

d. Identify and engage a number of community application development projects.

• During SC2002 John Towns and Jim Ferguson, along with Danny Powell (NCSA) and Radha Nadkumar (NCSA), met with a number of representatives from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's (http://www.birds.cornell.edu). Initial discussions were had regarding their IT infrastructure, examples of their research and data challenges and potential solutions/collaborations we can pursue with them. John will be following up with them on distributed applications support, opportunities for Lab participation in our programs, and opportunities for us to work together on educational initiatives.

e. Provide outreach and consultative user services.

• John Towns met with Dr. Weicheng Huang from Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing during his visit to NCSA on November 6. He is leading an effort to build a grid environment for Taiwan's academic research community. John advised him on middleware and policy strategies and potential collaborations with other efforts.
• John Towns, Jim Ferguson, Mitch Kutzko, and John Estabrook attended SC2002 in Baltimore. Ferguson, Kutzko and Estabrook did a 1-hour demonstration in the Alliance research exhibit on work from the group. Kutzko gave a talk on and demoed the latest Multicast Beacon work, Estabrook gave talk on and demoed the latest Web100 kernel and tools, including autotuning, and Ferguson demoed and talked on the Network Performance Advisor progress.
• John Towns met with visitors from the Laboratoria Nacional de Computacao Cientifica, Ministerio da Ciencia e Tecnologia in Brazil. John advised Dr. Bruno Schulze, Grid SINAPAD Project, Distributed Computing Group Leader and Dr. Leon Sinay, Pesquisador Titular, on Grid and middleware technologies and strategies during their Nov 25-26 visit to NCSA.

f. Coordinate with other NLANR projects to actively identify and collaborate on interdisciplinary scientific projects.

• John Towns and Jim Ferguson met with Ronn Ritke and Greg Monaco at SC2002 in Baltimore to discuss project status and collaborative ventures.