NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, March 2003

(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

• Network Performance Advisor: Much progress being made by Steven Ko, Steve Engelhardt, Jianzhong Liu, and Tanya Brethour on all aspects of the Network Performance Advisor. Prototype code for the Analysis Engine has been written and checked in, as well as many pieces of code relating to the Data Collector and the auto-update mechanism. The team will be meeting in early April to assess progress in all aspects of the project, and set a timeline for the next integration of all the pieces of code.
• Iperf: Version 1.7 was released and announced to the iperf-users email list. The main new feature of this release is two-way testing initiated from only one end of the connection. Kevin Gibbs has been busying himself with issues relating to the future version 2.0, as well as updating some aged documentation on Iperf. Tanya Brethour has produced an alpha version of a new User Interface to use with Iperf, which is being commented upon and revised with suggestions. The GUI version of Iperf will be more friendly to non-expert end users. Kevin Gibbs has been working on the Iperf development and answering user's email questions. As always, Kevin also works to evaluate code submissions from outside collaborators to see if there is something in them that can be included in the mainline code at the next release.
• Autotuning/GridFTP: - John Estabrook and Yanli Tong have contacted Scott Koranda (U.Wisconsin-Milwaukee, GriPhyN) and are providing him with a version of the Autobuf plug-in to the GridFTP utility for the latest version of Globus. Koranda is looking to make tranfers of large datasets more efficient for the GriPhyN project. Tong has taken a short break from coding and testing to update old documentation of the project on the DAST web site.

• See GridFTP work associated with GriPhyN above.
• Jim Ferguson attended GGF7 in Tokyo, Japan, John Towns was unable to attend due to personal matters. The "Grid Constitution," "Trouble Ticket Interchange" and Support Tools Requirements" were all discussed. Ferguson also actively participated in the Production Grid Management Research Group and the High Performance Grid Networking Working Group among others.
• John Towns continued his active role in the TeraGrid project. Policy issues on the use of this distributed resource are surfacing and it is expected that many will be addressed in the coming 1-2 months.

• Mitch Kutzko continues work on the Multicast Beacon upgrade to use RTP for communications instead of the current version which uses UDP. Recent efforts and investigations include
  • Working on tightening up the send/receive loop in the current Beacon test script.
  • Working on Beacon-in-full-mesh problem -- Being able to do this in a way that isn't easily breakable or prone to Denial of Service attacks.
  • At Jim Ferguson's suggestion, looking at WSDL, a meta-language in XML for Web Content Communication. For the Beacon, this might be a better option than using straight XML for the Beacon output pages.
• 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. The group will also be meeting at the Internet2 Members meeting in April, where Ferguson will be giving an update to the group on progress of the Network Performance Advisor.

• As part of the work on the Network Performance Advisor, NLANR/DAST is contributing the user interface for the Internet2 piPEs project. piPEs *may* eventually use other sections of code developed for The Adivsor, or adapt them to their specific requirements.

  Also, note the interactions mentioned above with Scott Koranda (U.Wisconsin-Milwaukee, GriPhyN) who is developing community applications and services for the GriPhyN/LIGO community.

• Hui Shen reviewed 80 current projects and added 7 new projects to the Advanced Applications Database during March 2003.

• The broader NLANR team held a phone call on 20 March for the purpose of discussing current work and collaboration opportunities. We discussed the upcoming PAM 2003 conference with Ronn Ritke, who was in the midst of planning activities for the conference.

  In a separate call with Ronn Ritke and Kevin Walsh (SDSC) we discussed some modifications to Iperf that Walsh and his colleagues had been contemplating and prototyping. These prototypes added some authentication and security layers to Iperf. Since we're doing some of that work with the Network Performance Advisor, Walsh and Ritke agreed that we should talk again once we do our next integration of the Advisor, which will include a simple security layer, and thus might meet Walsh's needs at SDSC.