NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, May 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

• Iperf network bandwidth utility: Kevin Gibbs put out a new release of Iperf (1.7.1) before he departed for a summer internship. The release was evaluated by John Estabrook and was "advertised" to the iperf-users email list. The new release incorporates some features we wished for the eventual 2.0 release, but did not have everything (including man pages) we have put on our "must have" list for 2.0. The new target for the 2.0 release will be in the Fall after Gibbs returns to NLANR/DAST.
• Network Performance Advisor: Stephen Engelhardt has left NLANR/DAST for other employment, but major progress continues to be made on several aspects of the Network Performance Advisor. Tanya Brethour has taken up sole programming lead of the project. Some of the time this month was spent making sure a smooth transition was accomplished on that part of the project which Engelhardt was lead. Englehardt completely updated the Design Document before he departed. Brethour also made a large amount of progress on the Expert GUI for the Advisor.
• Autobuf/GridFTP effort: Work on this effort slowed somewhat in May due to Finals (R.A. Yanli Tong is the main contributor) and the impending release of Globus Toolkit 2.4. NLANR/DAST formed a relationship with the NCSA mass storage group helping to develop a standalone utility 'uberftp' and will be working with that group to incorporate techniques used in Autobuf in that utility. The GriPhyN project, specifically Scott Koranda at UWisconsin-Milwaukee, consulted with the group directly during a visit to NCSA in May.

• See GridFTP work above

• Progress on the new Multicast Beacon by Mitch Kutzko (and helpful others assisting) was steady during May. Two nasty bugs were diagnosed and corrected and more features were successfully implemented in the new RTP way of doing things. Collaborators at Argonne National Lab and at Boston University helped to set up a small testbed for advanced testing of the new code. Kutzko has already arranged with Jennifer Tieg von Hoffman (Boston University) to do an Access Grid presentation on the new Beacon when it gets to a stable release this Summer. Bob Riddle of Internet2 will be working Kutzko's new methods into a tool deployed by that organization.
• 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 has been active in the TereaGrid User Service WG and other WGs, recent work has focused on coordinating documentation of the user environment and policy issues related to allocation of TeraGrid resources.
• John Towns has been actively coordinating with Grid issues related to NCSA and Alliance resources, namely the Alliance Technology Grid (ATG, grid-enabling the Alliance allocated resources) and the Alliance Grid Testbed (AGT, a new test bed of 7 site with 16-48 node Linux clusters). The AGT is specifically targeted at providing a set of resources for application developers to test grid services.
• As an active participant in The TeraGrid, the Alliance Technology Grid and the Alliance Grid Testbed, John Towns has been working to assure that all three grid environments are interoperable.

• Note above regarding Scott Koranda and the GriPhyN project.

• Towns, Ferguson, and other members of the group made new or renewed contacts with several key users of PACI HPC systems at the Alliance All-hands meeting May 1-2.
• During May 2003, fourteen new users completed the "Tuning Applications for High Performance Networks", an online WebCT course developed and maintained by the DAST and hosted at http://webct.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8900/public/TUNING/.
• We continue to get traffic for help and support with the Iperf measurement utility that averages 5-7 emails per week. Volume has been slightly higher due to the release of new 1.7.x codes, and getting them adjusted and running on various OS's which we do not have access to here at DAST.
• Hui Shen reviewed 43 current projects and added 15 new projects to the Advanced Applications Database during May 2003. Hui will be working full time during the summer months.

• Held monthly Coordinator's call on May 8th with collaborators at San Diego's NLANR/MNA. We caught up on each other's current work.