NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, April 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. The team working on the Advisor has set some short-term milestones with the goal to get a fully-integrated system completed by 15 June. Progress has been good, and there is a chance to meet the self-imposed deadline.
• Iperf: Iperf 1.7 was announced to current the current iperf-user subscribers and many new downloads and feedback resulted. A new Iperf GUI ("jperf") continues to be developed by Tanya Brethour. There are many important features to work into Iperf 2.0, so the earlier goal of a May release looks doubtful. An interim release between 1.7 and 2.0 may be done, but this may also be a good time for a thorough testing regimen and catching up with documentation, FAQ, and man pages--all things we want to have in place for a 2.0 rollout.
• Autotuning/GridFTP: - John Estabrook, Jim Ferguson and Yanli Tong met personally Scott Koranda (U.Wisconsin-Milwaukee, GriPhyN) when he was in Champaign-Urbana for the NCSA All-Hands meeting. The DAST is providing Koranda with a version of the Autobuf plug-in to the GridFTP utility for the latest version of Globus. Koranda is also looking at installing the Web100 operating systems, which DAST can assist with. This is all part of the effort to make transfer of large datasets more efficient for the GriPhyN project.

• See GridFTP work associated with GriPhyN above.
• John Towns participated as a panelist for the NMI proposal reviews.

• 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
  • Fixing some older problems with Java Beacon clients, and pushing the new client out to several users.
  • Add patch instructions to the Beacon guide_faq.php file for the maxReportPacketSize of 8192 bug.
• Jim Ferguson attended the Internet2 Members Meeting and gave two talks, both on aspects of Web100. Both presentations, "Web100 Rollout" and "Web100 and Logistical Networking" are available at the conference presentations website http://events.internet2.edu/p_by_events.php?evt_id=134 Ferguson also gave an informal talk on the current status of The Adivsor to the End-to-End Technical Advisory Group meeting at the I2 Members Meeting.
• John Estabrook attended the PAM2003 conference in San Diego. The conference included a paper by former NLANR/DAST graduate student Ajay Tirumala which used Web100 along with DAST's Iperf to make accurate achievable bandwidth measurements with much less impact on the network being tested. The paper is available at http://moat.nlanr.net/PAM2003/PAM2003papers/3801.pdf
• 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 is identifying the applications most appropriate for NLANR/DAST involvement from the TeraGrid project. A set of "flagship" and signature application have been identified within the TeraGrid project and NLANR/DAST staff will be assigned to appropriate applications.

• 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.

• John Estabrook and Yanli Tong are consulting with Juri Toomre regarding moving a large amount of his research data from San Diego Supercomputer Center to NCSA. The first "batch" of data to be moved is six terabytes in size. A variety of data transfer methods may be tried in a comparison of methods using this real data. Among the utilities that may be tested are Storage Resource Broker, the new 'uberftp' using GridFTP, and another FTP on platforms with Web100 autotuning enabled. First priority is, of course, to get Toomre's data to NCSA in a timely fashion so that he may continue his computational research.
• Hui Shen reviewed 69 current projects and added 3 new projects to the Advanced Applications Database during April 2003.
• Tanya Brethour, Steve Engelhardt, and Jim Ferguson worked on and submitted a Tutorial proposal for SC2003, based on the network Performance Advisor. The proposed tutorial would step non-network engineer users through downloading & installing the Advisor, as well as using and interpreting the information the Advisor will provide.

• Jim Ferguson met with Kevin Walsh (SDSC) while both were at the Internet2 Spring members meeting. They had further discussions on some modifications to Iperf that Walsh and his colleagues had been contemplating and prototyping. These prototypes added some authentication and security layers to Iperf. Ferguson agreed to send along the first integrated prototype of the Advisor system when it is completed, which is expected in mid-June.