20140521 SLAC SEECS and UNIMAS Meeting

Time & date 

Wednesday  May 21st,  2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday may 22nd 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday May 22nd, 2014 12:00 noon Malaysian time, Thursday May 22nd, 2014 1:00am Rio Standard Time.

Attendees

Invitees:

Anjum+, Hassaan Khaliq, Kashif+, Raja+,  Johari+, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul, Ridzuan+, Ibrahim, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib, Les+, Renan, Bebo

+ Confirmed attendance

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

Actual attendees:

Anjum, Hasaan, Kashif, Raja, Saqib, Les

Administration

• Adib is waiting to hear from colleague (Dr. Nordin: chair of ISTT2014), there was no update as of this meeting. The conference is 2 days so the workshop may be squeezed to one day. The conference will be held in Langkawi between 24-26 Nov.  

  Hopefully, this will help us to attract good number of participants and get sponsor/support to cover our expenditure. Other option is to conduct the workshop in UUM, we are ready to provide Local Arrangement (lab, local transportation, and food). But there is no funding provided by the school  to support the transportation/accommodation of the  speakers.

• Anjum will try and contact Adib. Anjum is also putting together a conference on cloud computing in November. I may be possible to co-locate the PingEr workshop with this conference.

• Les will be in Burkina Faso Nov 13-21. He flies back to London on Nov 22nd.  He can get to Malaysia mid morning November 24th. Thus the workshop should be at the end of the ISTT2014 meeting if Les is to attend.

• Anjum suggested putting together a paper on metrics provided by PingER for Sigmetrix. The due date is in November.

Renan

Renan 's  paper on "Linked Open Data Publication Strategies: Application in Networking Performance Measurement Data" to the Academy of Science 2014 Bigdata / SocialCom / Cybersecurity conference at Stanford May 27-31 has been accepted (last year acceptance was 8.5%) for a poster session May 29th. See http://www.scienceengineering.org/ase/conference/2014/bigdata/sanjose/website/program/.  Renan and his supervisor will be coming to Stanford for the meeting and will present the paper

UM

Badrul is still awaiting hearing from his student (Abdulrahim Haroun Ali) on  the paper on anomalies in PingER measurements  and will update later once the paper ready. 

Ridzuan has put together a rough proposal to use Hadoop to store and make available PingER data.  He is evaluating several vendors version of Hadoop 2.0 installations to decide which is the right one to adopt. Last time he successfully installed and tried Hadoop 1.0 but then it has many drawbacks such as no real-time streaming processing.  Johari sent information on the Myren Cloud. The web site  is as follows: https://cloud.myren.net.my/. It gives information about the service and how to apply, plus user guide is available from the website. As for Ridzuan, he should be eligible to register for the service, but he needs to check with  UM (University Malaya) procedures for applying for the service. 

Ibrahim Abaker  is planning to work on a topic initially entitled " leveraging pingER big data with a modified pingtable for event-correlation and clustering".  Ibrahim has a proposal, see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17162/leveraging%20pingER%20big%20data%20with%20a%20modified%20pingtable%20for%20event-correlation%20and%20clustering.docx. He is currently spending  time reading about RDF storage and its retrieval, also he is  trying to setup Hadoop clusters for the experiment. He is in email discussion with Renan on which part to work on first. He plans to  collaborate with Renan to make the pinger store and process more efficient. Les has sent him documentation of PinGER which is very helpful. Ridzuans' work is more to do with hosting the data and stream data analysis. Ibrahim is looking more at applying MapReduce ( programming model for processing large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster), reducing the storage needs and providing querying of the data.

UNIMAS

Dr. Adnan Shahid Khan who recently joined UNIMAS, will be joining our PingER group and will help with the current PingER initiative in UNIMAS. His contact details have been updated at the PingER Malaysia website (http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php). Badrul has been requested to add Adnan's email address to the pinger mailing list.

The Raspberry Pi is at the data centre and has a public IP address. The private IP address works but not the public. Johari reports no progress 4/8/2014, 4/23/2014.

The tool to enable synchronizing Malaysian monitors is completed. It has been tested by Saqib. Saqib requested to add sorting the HostList by country, Johari will add this.

The traceroute server at http://pinger2.unimas.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl  has the same problem as before. They know (sort of) the problem but haven't got the chance to rectify it (mapping NAT address, needs to be added). There is no progress 12/4/2013, 1/8/2013, 1.22.2014, 2/5/2014, 3/26/2014, 4/8/2014, 4/23/2014. Now that the historical traceroutes are working for UM (see below) there is an extra incentive to get the reverse traceroute working at UTM and UNIMAS

Johari has a research student who finalized a proposal in order to officially apply for his masters.  He will start in February. He is currently working on threshold/anomaly detection, and will extend to correlating performance over multiple routes. He will share the proposal with Les and others April.

UTM 

No updates regarding traceroute problem at UTM. However, Saqib thinks the problem is still in CICT firewall or router as tcp traceroute command works fine from UTM.

The Malaysian Case study is completed. Saqib has included the packet loss analysis at UM in the case study.  Les has reviewed and sent suggestions. Saqib will incorporate.

Unfortunately the FRGS proposal was rejected as Saqib's Project leader does not have any relevant publications in his record. Saqib proposes to submit another in ERGS or E-Science grants. He is in discussions with his PhD. superviser to get the requirements and has started on a proposal to submit elsewhere

UUM

Regarding the monitoring host in UUM, Adib has assigned one student to prepare the configuration/installation plan including how to secure our host from attack. He has a public IP address.  He needs to the DNS registration by Sunday or Monday.  He is in the last stage of working with the Computer Center. Adib requested Johari to share  the UNIMAS setting so it is easier for the student to follow. 

NUST

All references for the Bahawalpur site goes to Director IT, but he is still silent and we are waiting for his reply.

Kashif reports the  installation of PingER at Sahiwal is complete. Added as PingER monitor and traceroute/ping server.

The following nodes (were down for months) and have now been recovered by the efforts made by Kashif in the last two weeks and they are working fine now. These all are also updated with the new beacon list by replacing pinger.xml file.

1. pinger.nca.edu.pk
2. pinger.nwfpuet.edu.pk
3. pinger.pern.edu.pk (HEC)

   1. pinger2 command was working on "pinger.pern.edu.pk" but due to space shortage it was not storing data. Now Kashif removed some older files and it starts working again, also the time of the server was not correct so he changed that too.

4. pingerfsbd.pern.edu.pk
5. pingerisl-fjwu.pern.edu.pk
6. pinger.lcwu.edu.pk is also fine. collection status at SLAC will change the color today after collecting data for 19th May arround 4pm PKST. 
7. pingermtn.pern.edu.pk 
   1. pingermtn.pern.edu.pk remained DOWN for most of the time due to power outage in last week. Due to sudden breakdown, the Linux OS was also creating problem at reboot and get stuck in checkdisk type of errors and was demanding manual clicks and commands.  So, in this situation, Kashif requested to the contact person and he managed to arrange UPS for the PingER monitoring node. Hopefully it will UP now most of the time or at least till the backup time of UPS, if power outage remains for multiple consecutive hours.
      
8. pinger.uob.edu.pk is working, but having multi-hour power outages each day. This usually means that when SLAC normally goes to gather the data in the early morning Pacific time the host does not respond so we are unable to gather the data.  Analyzing the outages, it it appears that a good time gather the data is at ~11:00am Pacific time, since the host usually responds at that time.
   
9.  www.upesh.edu.pk
10. buitms.seecs.edu.pk
11. maggie1.seecs.edu.pk
12. monitor.seecs.edu.pk
    
    1. Also needed the time corrected and updated pinger2.pl and pinger.xml

Kashif is working on the rest of nodes. He plans to have 3 or 4 more up and running this coming week..  Among those, may be the following that have not responded to gathering data in the last month are:

• airuniversity.seecs.edu.pk
• cae.seecs.edu.pk
• duhs.seecs.edu.pk
• nukhimain.seecs.edu.pk
• pinger.kohat.edu.pk
• pingerisl-qau.pern.edu.pk
• pingerjms.pern.edu.pk
• pingerkhi-uok.pern.edu.pk
• sau.seecs.edu.pk
• uaf.seecs.edu.pk

To assist in SEECS gathering data: nodes.cf is now available via http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/. Also to assist in debugging some problems with gathering and checking the data the SLASC versions of checkdata.pl and checkdata_gif.pl are available at the same place.

Raja

Raja, Umar and Les have submitted the paper on TULIP and its application to Visual Tracerouting to the Vancouver conference in November. Aceptances are due in July. Raja is improving the GUI for TULIP. In particular visualizing the intersection region (showing both the minimum and maximal circles), showing landmarks, adding Google analytics, and looking at providing results from undns (a tool for guessing the location from the router name) for VTrace.

PingER at SLAC

Les requested an update from Yahoo about TULIP's geolocation. They answered "We are very much interested in getting IP triangulation at internet scale, we will have internal sync-up on how we can leverage this initiative if there is rate limit and get back. Regarding opening up yahoo sites for deploying ping server requires some more time to discuss this with relevant stake holders with in yahoo." No word, sent a reminder 5/19/2014.

Les sent email to Google as follows: "I would like to bring to your attention that we have developed a geolocation tool using delay based (using RTTs from known ping server landmarks) distance estimates to triangulate the location of an IP host target. The tools is accessible at: http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/reflex.cgi. We have identified that the accuracy of the geolocation is directly related to the landmark density (e.g. # of landmarks/ million sq km). The higher the density the smaller the error and the fall off is exponential. We currently have over 1000 registered landmarks, of which at any given time ~300 are working. The tool not only finds the location of the target, it also gives an estimated error. To the best of our knowledge it is the only freely available delay based measurement geolocation service publicly available today. A drawback (compared to database methods such as those based on GeoMind) is the time taken to make the measurements. We have worked on this from many directions including parallelization of the ping requests, caching, tiering to get the rough location (i.e. region of the world) then zooming in using all landmarks in the region. We are putting together a publication on this."

Old Items

Linked Open Data

Renan  finished the new pingerlod web site. The new thing is that it should be much easier now to modify the info texts. What Renan did was to put the texts into a separate file. The new version has been loaded on the server and some text added to describe how to use the map. However there is a bug that prevents it from executing the map. Renan reports that the bugs should be easy to fix. He has talked to his professor who suggested trying RDF Owlink, it should have faster responses to queries. Renan will research this.  It will probably mean reloading the PingER data so is a lot of work, hopefully this will improve performance. Before the rebuild he will make the fixes and provide a new WAR for us to load on pingerlod.slac.stanford.edu. He is also working on documentation (he has finished the ontology and has a nice interactive tool for visualizing it, since the ontology is the core of the data model of our semantic solution, this will be very helpful for anyone who uses our system, both a developer of the system and a possible user) and his thesis. Bebo pointed out that to get publicity and for people to know about the data, we will need to add pingerlod to lod.org.

Things he will soon do regarding documentation:

1. A task/process flow writing all java classes involved on all those batch jobs;
2. A Javadoc <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-jsp-135444.html> which will explain all classes and how they are used.

For the Linked Open Data / RDF which is in pre-alpha days, you can go to http://pingerlod.slac.stanford.edu. As can be seen this page is not ready for prime time. However the demos work as long as one carefully elects what to look at:

• Click on Visualizations, there are two choices:
  • Multiple Network Metrics: Click on the image: gives a form, choose from Node pinger.slac.stanford.edu pinging to www.ihep.ac.cn, time parameters yearly, 2006 2012, metrics throughput, Average RTT Packet loss and display format Plot graph, then click on submit. In a few seconds time series graph should come up. Mouse over to see details of values at each x value (year).
  • A mashup of network metrics x university metrics Click on image: gives another form, pinging from pinger.slac.stanford.edu, School metric number of students, time metric years 2006 2012, display format plot graph, click on submit. Longer wait, after about 35 seconds a google map should show up. Click on "Click for help." Area of dots = number of students, darkness of dots = throughput (lighter is better), inscribing circle color gives university type (public, private etc.) Click on circle for information on university etc.

• Renan will be working on providing documentation on the programs, in particular the install guide for the repository and web site etc. This will assist the person who takes this over. 

Renan is using OWLIM as RDF Repository. He is using an evaluation version right now. Renan looked into the price for OWLIM (that excellent RDF Database Management System he told us about). It would cost 1200EUR minimum  (~ 1620 USD, according to Google's rate for today) for a one time eternal license. It seems too expensive. No wonder it is so good. Anyhow, he heard about a different free alternative. Just not sure how good it would be for our PingER data. He will try it out and evaluate. He will also get a new evaluation of the free OWLIM lite.  

He has also made some modifications on the ontology of the project (under supervision of his professor in Rio) hence he  will have to modify the code to load the data accordingly.

Renan has provided a 4 page Appendix on PingERLOD to the ICFA report.  This is also available at PingER LOD Overview

Raspberry Pi

A quick comparison of the performance of the two hosts (raspberry pi and regular UNIMAS host) without statistical quantification is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY.  A page has been created to compare the hardware spec between the pinger.unimas.my node (Intel architecture) and the pinger2.unimas.my node (Raspberry Pi ARM architecture), available from the unimas pinger website at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/hardware.php. There is a link to hardware.php in the Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY web page.

NUST

At the Connect Asia Pacific Summit in Bangkok in  January and seeing the  project "Mapping the pan Asia Pacific information Superhighway and closing gaps in infrastructure  connectivity" Shahryar found that very much related to the work in the PingER project. So Shahryar sent email to a UN agency for a possible collaboration with them on PingER project. He has heard nothing so he will write a detailed proposal and then should contact them again. No update 2/5/2014, 3/5/2014.

Tulip

Follow up from workshop

• Hossein Javedani of UTM is interested in anomalous event detection with PingER data. Information on this is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Event+Detection. We have sent him a couple of papers and how to access the PingER data. Hossein and Badrul have been put in contact. Is there an update Badrul?

The Next step in funding is to go for bigger research funding, such as LRGS or eScience. Such proposals must lead to publications in high quality journals. They will need an infrastructure such as the one we are building. We can use the upcoming workshop (1 specific session) to brainstorm and come up with such proposal. We need to do some groundwork before that as well. Johari will take the lead in putting together 1/2 page descriptions of the potential research projects. 

1. Need to identify a few key areas of research related to PingER Malaysia Initiative and this can be shared/publicized through the website. These might include using the infrastructure and data for: anomaly detection; correlation of performance across multiple routes; and for GeoLocation. Future projects as Les listed in Confluence herehttps://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects can also be a good start and also Bebo's suggestion. 
2. Need to synchronize and share research proposals so as not to duplicate research works. how to share? Maybe not through the website, or maybe can create a member only section of the website to share sensitive data such as research proposal?

Anjum suggested Saqib,  Badrul and Johari put together a paper on user experiences with using the Internet in Malaysia as seen from Malaysian universities. In particular round trip time, losses, jitter, reliability, routing/peering, in particular anomalies, and the impact on VoIP, throughput etc.  It would be good to engage someone from MYREN.

Potential projects

See list of Projects

Future meeting  - Les

Next meeting Wednesday June 4th  2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday June 5th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday June 5th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday June 5th, 2014 01:00am Rio Standard Time.

Coordinates of team members:

See: http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php