NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, December 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

• A subset of the DAST group met to discuss design issues of The Advisor's analysis engine, working off of Richa Hingle's draft thesis which she provided for us. After the design is completed, which is likely to be in the form of a 'DAG', Tanya Brethour will be the lead on the coding. Steve Engelhardt will be responsible for the data archive element of The Advisor.
• Iperf development: Iperf 1.6.4 was released on December 7. A new Iperf logo was put together by Kevin Gibbs with input from other interested parties. User questions continue to come in at the rate of 4-6 per week. Gibbs, along with contributions from Brethour and Jon Dugan (NCSA) will be working on Iperf 1.7 with an eye towards an end of January release.

• Yanli Tong and John Estabrook wrapped up a release of the Autobuf-enabled GridFTP plug-in to send to Andrew Chein (UCSD) for analysis by his research group for use in the TeraGrid environment. Tong is in contact with the students doing the analysis, and has also started adapting the current work to the latest Globus toolkit (2.2) which she is installing on her machine as well as our test machine "niobe".

• Mitch Kutzko continues work on the Multicast Beacon upgrade to use RTP for communications instead of the current version which uses UDP. Tony Rimovsky is guiding Kutzko, and many outside collaborators have a serious interest in progress.
• Jim Ferguson is a member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Internet2 End-to-End Performance Initiative. The group meets via phone conference twice per month, listening to issues and providing advice and guidance for the I2 initiative.
• John Towns participated in the NSF Middleware Initiative Planing Meeting held in Chicago, IL on December 12. The meeting was setting plans for the coming months and in particular addressed issues of support and documentation for the components and integrated package of NMI software. Towns also participates in weekly GRIDS Center calls dealing with the technical details of the integration, packaging, distribution and support processes.

• Editing was completed on an online course for tuning networked applications. It is available on the NCSA WebCT site at http://webct.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8900/public/TUNING During December, 21 users entered and used the course materials. The next online course to be completed will be a narrative course on using Iperf, for non-engineers.