NLANR/DAST Monthly Update, June 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: Damon Cook, a new Research Assistant this summer for NLANR/DAST, has prepared a newly revised comprehensive FAQ for Iperf and posted it at http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/iperf_faq.html Cook has also been assigned to create (for the first time) real 'man' pages for Iperf, and has also started working (with Tanya Brethour) on a completely updated new GUI for Iperf.
• Network Performance Advisor: Significant progress continues to be made on several aspects of the Network Performance Advisor. Project Lead Tanya Brethour has laid out a near-term plan for the summer, and it is being executed by Jianzhong Liu and Steven Ko. The main efforts this summer are in the areas of activation (Liu/Ko), security (Ko), and the two GUIs (Brethour).
• Autobuf/GridFTP effort: Effort in Autobuf continued, including a side-track to fix a problem with Autobuf 2.0 and Solaris, which was wanted by an end user keen to use the tool for transferring his data. The bug was particularly tricky, and both Yanli Tong and John Estabrook looked for a solution and/or work around for the users. Estabrook talked with developers associated with the GridFTP effort at the GGF-8 meeting in Seattle (see below).

• See GridFTP work above
• Jim Ferguson and John Estabrook attended the Eighth meeting of the Global Grid Forum in Seattle, Wash., June 25-27. Ferguson helped to run two sessions of the Grid User Services Research Group (he is Secretary of the RG) and continued to contribute to the Grid High Performance Networking working group and the Network Measurement working group.

• Progress on the new Multicast Beacon by Mitch Kutzko (and helpful others assisting) moved to the "alpha release" stage during June. A further collaborator in the testbed for the new code was brought in--Bruce Curtis at North Dakota volunteered a machine for testing the new Beacon script. Extensive testing continued to uncover small bugs which are being chased and resolved by Kutzko with help from many other interested advisors. Kutzko has a goal of a stable Beta release by late July, and is busy trying to track down a memory leak in addition to other small matters.
• 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 TeraGrid User Service WG and other WGs. Recent activity has focused on establishing a consistent grid middleware software installation.
• 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). Middleare services are being completely re-installed on ATG resources since there had been a lapse in support of these. Testing of these services with begin in early June. The AGT is specifically targeted at providing a set of resources for application developers to test grid services. Harware has been delivered to all sites and is being assembled. Initial testing of this environment will begin in July. GRid software stack issue have been discussed at length to assure interoperability with TeraGrid.
• 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.

• The NLANR/DAST team working on the Network Performance Advisor hosted a meeting between itself and the piPEs development team of the Internet2 on June 9-10. Jim Ferguson, Tanya Brethour, Jianzhong Liu, John Estabrook and Damon Cook of DAST all met with Eric Boyd and Matt Zekauskus and Russ Hobby(via phone) from Internet2. Boyd and Zekauskus traveled down from Ann Arbor to talk about continuing collaboration between the piPEs measurement effort and the DAST's Network Performance Advisor. Brethour and Boyd presented their respective team's current status, and we talked over how we could share some of each other's work, as well as insure that our data collected could be used in each other's utility. The two projects mesh very well, as The Advisor will be concentrating on an Analysis Engine (which the I2 team would like to use eventually) and the I2 team will be working on other aspects that are of less immediate interest to the Advisor project. In combination with a meeting last summer in Ann Arbor, and constant contact between leads of the projects, it appears that the two projects are continuing on a path of mutual support and the avoidance of significant duplication of effort.

• John Estabrook has cleared the last of the obstacles to moving user Juri Toomre's (U.Colorado - Boulder) data to NCSA from SDSC using Storage Resource Broker. Now that a trail has been blazed through the Teragrid project partners, we would hope future large SRB transfers will be much quicker in being initiated.
• Mitch Kutzko is part of a local team enabling Dr. Ha at KISTI (South Korea), working with Dr. Balachandra at the University of Illinois. The project Ha and Balachandra are working on can benefit from Grid Services (they think) and are eager to be directed to good resources and to be guided in their effort. Kutzko will team with Tom Roney (NCSA) in providing user support for this project.
• Hui Shen reviewed 220 current projects and added 30 new projects to the Advanced Applications Database during May 2003.
• Greg Cole, John Towns, Natalia Bulashova, and Jim Ferguson completed the interviewing process and have extended an offer to a candidate for the main position to support the NextINet and Outreach portions of the DAST effort.
• During June 2003, nineteen 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 continues to be higher due to the release of new 1.7.x codes. Kevin Gibbs, a Research Assistant during the recent school year and this summer an intern at company in Cincinnati, still enjoys helping out on some of the support traffic that comes across our 'iperf-users' email list.
• Jim Ferguson participated in an NSF Review Panel on June 2-3.