20150204 SLAC SEECS and UNIMAS Meeting

Time & date 

Wednesday Feb 4th 2015 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Feb 5th  2015  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Feb 5th 2015 noon Malaysian time, Thursday  Feb 5th, 2015 02:00am Rio Standard Time.  

Attendees

Invitees:

Anjum+, Hassaan Khaliq?, Kashif, Raja,  Samad Riaz?, Johari+, Nara, Adnan Khan+, Abdullah, Badrul, Ridzuan, Ibrahim?, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib+, Les+, Renan, Bebo+

+ Confirmed attendance

? Emails sent just before the meeting as a reminder since we needed updates.

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

Actual attendees:

• Adib, Johari, Adnan, Les, Bebo and Hafizi Jalil of MYREN.
• Saqib had network problems,
• Anjum had a meeting that ran over.
• Hassaan had a death in the family he will update the NUST hosts information.

Administration

• Hafizi Jalil of MYREN  joined the meeting. He introduced himself. He has been at MYREN for 1.5 years. He maintains developments for the MYREN network. He has PingER installations at Cyberjaya and UNIMAS. He has more machines, currently running perfSONAR at UMP, UTM, UM and another site. This week he will install PingER and the traceroute servers on these machines. A goal would be to compare and contrast the benefits of perfSONAR and PingER.
• Anjum and Raja have been working on a paper on Geolocation as developed for TULIP. Using an exponential relation between the Directivity (Alpha) and RTT for Pakistan the accuracy is ~ 18Km. Now Raja needs to run for Europe and the US. Meanwhile Raja has got a job and has less time to work on this so it was stalled. Les contacted Raja and Raja agrees it is important to finish the measurements and the paper, and will endeavor to do so. Anjum is currently working on another paper. Once he finishes that, If Raja didn’t find time to complete the results, he will try to see if he can take over and run the code him-self.
• Anjum's contract has been extended for 1 year
• Saqib's contract expired last month, he is back in Pakistan.
• The 2015 ICFA/SCIC report is completed. It is available at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/icfa/icfa-net-paper-jan15/report-jan15.docx
• Hafizi Jalil will send Les his email address.  Les will ask Badrul to add it to the pinger-my email list. Done 2/5/2015, Badrul has added Hafizi and added the ability for Les to manage the list. LA copy of the list is at: Membership of pinger-my
• Johari will add Ibrahim to the PingER contacts list. Done 2/5/2015

• Johari has got the OK from the conference organizing committee to hold a colocated PingER/BigData workshop on August 3rd the day before the  CITA 2015 (see http://www.cita.my/ an International Conference 4th - 6th August 2015, on transforming Big Data into Knowledge. Johari will provide relevant information to Bebo. Bebo will be able to make a presentation.  Also Ridzuan or Ibrahim or Renan have interest in submitting a full paper by March 2nd 2015. 

UFRJ

They are having some difficulties trying to get a proper platform to run our tests. They have already received funding for a new infrastructure but to get everything installed and running took us longer than they  thought, as it is summer vacation in Rio and part of the staff at the university is not at work.  

The plan is still the one seen before (see project proposal), experimenting those alternatives. Right now, they managed to triplify the data according to a new ontology that takes advantage of a combination of a current standard for multidimensional data (called data cube vocabulary) and a revised version of Renan's Moment ontology adaptation. With this we expect to have a better data organization than the previous solution.

They are now preparing a test plan (like a small benchmark) to be used on all alternatives so that we can compare the results accordingly. 

Les will contact Maria Luiza Campos of UFRJ (now on a one year leave of absence in Italy) to see if we can repeat the visit of Renan with a new student. Done 2/5/2015.

Les has requested (in January) Renan to provide an estimate of how DF bloats the data. Renan/Christiane are looking at this. Renan's pointed out "Finding RDF data size in bytes is not simple because it depends on which Triple Store will be used and how each triple is physically stored. One may store triples as plain texts, other may do as compressed data in specific formats, which would be much smaller."Once we have the number of PingER triples and how much the used Triple Store needs (in bytes) to store a known number of general triples, we may estimate PingER RDF data size.". Requested an update by email to Cristiane & Renan 2/4/2015.

UUM

pinger.uum.edu.my is down Jan 31st, Feb 1st. Adib reports it is currently down disconnected due to a technical problem at UUM computer centre. Adib is trying to get more reliable power (UPS).

Adib has been discussing with Anjum looking at potential PingER  projects. Adib has a master student. In particular they are interested in providing more flexible access to PingER data rather than the limited time windows pingtable.pl provides. This may be by providing database access rather than using flat files. Les will provide:

• Access to Pinger Data in flat files via FTP.  Done 2/5/2015. Les has sent information on the archive available via anonymous ftp
• Perl scripts for: making measurements, gathering the data, and analyzing the data. Done 2/5/2015: Les has sent getdata.pl (the gathering script), wrap-analyze-daily.pl (the initial analysis script that takes the raw gathered data and creates hourly data points for each metric),  the link to the measurement script pinger2.pl
• Documentation on the data formats. Done see: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/retrievedata.html and PingER data flow at SLAC

UM

There has been no feedback to an email to Ibrahim (2/4/2015). Last we noted was:

Ibrahim has setup distributed hadoop clusters. He has 2TB of disk space. Les has provided information on getting a subset of PingER data by anonymous ftp via ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/users/cottrell.  It was put there last September. Information on how the data was put together is at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Archiving+PingER+data+by+tar+for+retrieval+by+anonymous+ftp. There is information on formatting etc at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/retrievedata.html and some on the dataflows at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+data+flow+at+SLAC. Renan at UFRJ has successfully used this data, he has also characterized the data in terms of bytes/metric per year etc.

Ibrahim has started downloading all zip files in the local machines. 6 weeks ago he downloaded 2 GB of Weather data to test his nodes cluster, he  wrote a simple Java program (Map, Reduce) to find the Average and it was working fine. 

UNIMAS

Johari had no updates 2/4/2015. His top priorities are:

1. Reviving the Raspbery Pi
2. Getting the research student going on anomalous behaviour detection methods.

Johari still has to uncover the problem of the traceroute from UNIMAS. UDP has been unblocked. The MYREN  host works fine and share most of the hops. Thus the problem must be in the first few hops.

From previous meetings

The two major issues with the Raspberry Pi would be:

• are the results statistically the same as for the other monitor at UNIMAS (e.g. use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test); There is Advanced Project (Master by coursework student) working on the statistics of the data from the raspberry Pi and the production PingER monitor at UNIMAS to see how much they differ.
• is it reliable/robust is it clear what to do to debug problems remotely (e.g. if it is at Bario).  Looking at the monitoring data I have been unable to collect any from it (it is pingable, and port 80 responds, however the remote traceroute and ping_data.pl are not working) since Oct 20th which does not sound promising. Will need to evaluate the robustness of the unit by doing simulated scenario of various events such as power failure, hard and cold reboot, etc. Johari will need access to computer center to verify it comes up correctly after reboot etc.
• Johari will go to the computer center the coming weekend and look at improving the auto re-start.

If/when it works it would be instructive to look at the data from pinger and raspberry pi to Malaysia since the distances are shorter and the differences may show up better. For Sep-Oct 2014 when there was data measured from both Oct-Nov the averages for 20 paths was 52+-21ms (from pinger.unimas.my to 20 other Malaysian hosts) and 56+-21ms for raspberry pi to 20 other Malaysian hosts.

UTM

After revision the FRGS proposal was submitted to RMC. It was not accepted. We need to update it again in order to fulfill the requirements of the grant. Is there an update?

Saqib has updated the case study and is available in Google drive as a "Shared-PingER" document for review at https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-NEKleLll79ZFNmUnhiVGJ0Nmc&usp=sharing_eid 

The traceroute problem regarding maximum reachable hops ( i.e. 11 hopes ) may be since the Unix/Linux/OSX  traceroute uses UDP to send the requests. The first request is sent to a particular port (33434), with a ttl  to tell it how many hops to go to.  The ttl starts at 1 is incremented as it tries the next hop, also the port is incremented (up to 33465).  It looks like the first few UDP ports are enabled and then they are blocked. The Windows traceroute uses ICMP to send the probes so does not see the problem..

NUST

Nobody on the meeting from NUST 2/4/2015.

We are unable to resolve the name of the hosts: pinger.uet.edu.pk, pinger.isra.edu.pk,  web.hepgrid.uerj.br

pinger.uob.edu.pk appears to be partially working according to http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/checkdata/, however it appears to be unreachable at regular intervals:

We are unable to get data from the following hosts for a long time, the report below was from January. For the latest see: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/checkdata/Jan.html

• buitms.seecs.edu.pk #The person does not wish to continue working with us.Should we Disable gathering data from this host?
• nukhimain.seecs.edu.pk #Unable to gather data since 20th November, 2014
• pinger.nca.edu.pk #This node was working following the previous meeting but we have been unable to gather data since 18th Dec.
• pinger.uettaxila.edu.pk #The node need fresh installation but Samad has issue in visiting the site that's why it is not working from many days. Last gathered data 17 September
• pingerisl-fjwu.pern.edu.pk #There is a problem in the link to that node that's why it is not working from a long time. i am in contact with the concern person. hope it will be up in a week. Last gathered data 27th October 2014.
• pingerlhr.pern.edu.pk. Last gathered data October 13,2014
• sau.seecs.edu.pk. Unable to gather data since 4th December 2014

The following are pingable but there is no data:

• ns3.pieas.edu.pk
• www.upesh.edu.pk #After the last meeting Samad indicated need installation.will be up in a day. The concern person will re install Pinger today according to our commitment.  However with the recent attack on a school in Peshawar several universities are closed for security reasons.

Pinger at SLAC

Completed putting together annual report for PingER. It is available at: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger under reports pull down or more directly at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/icfa/icfa-net-paper-jan15/report-jan15.docx. Enjoy.

Added report on Duplicate pings as seen by mining the PingER data, still working on.

Bebo arranged a meeting with the Colombia RENATA NREN folks and the minister of IT to discuss the use of PingER in Colombia. There is a web page at: Colombia. Les has sent an email asking them to install pinger2.pl at at least one site in Columbia.

Next meeting

Next meeting:  Wednesday Mar 4th 2015 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Mar 5th  2015  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Mar 5th 2015 noon Malaysian time, Thursday  Mar 5th, 2015 02:00am Rio Standard Time.  

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.

Maria and Renan are advancing in some approaches to deal with PingER data, making it easier to be analyzed and integrated. In particular they have been busy studying and evaluating alternatives, analyzing results from the latest benchmarks on NoSQL (including RDF and graph based storages) database management, distributed processing and mediated  solutions over relational databases, and also other experiments with multidimensional analyses on Linked Data.  The new students involved are now understanding better the scenario and they have been interacting with Renan regularly. 

They have separated the tasks into 2: 

1. Quantitative analysis on PingER data
   1. They want to know how PingER has grown, since 1998 until today and how it might be in the next years. By doing this, we may focus on more suitable technologies that deal with scenarios that have a similar profile with PingER.
      1. Two students are working on this.
2. Approaches to handle PingER current data
   1. Conventional approach – Utilization of Cassandra as back-end database to provide easy crossing of parameters to get PingER data.
      1. One student is working on this.
   2. Distributed and parallel approach – Utilization of a data warehouse on top of a distributed file system to provide low latency response to complex queries (like the ones we were not able to do on my previous work). Additionally, how Scientific Workflow Management Systems may help in the ETL process of transforming PingER so it can easily be stored on the data warehouse.
      1. Renan is working on this.
   3. Pure RDF approach – Good ways of modeling and natively storing RDF data.
      1. Maria-Luiza is working on this.
   4. NoSQL approaches – How other NoSQL DBMS may be adequate for PingER multidimensional data.
      1. Two students are evaluating existing NoSQL solutions for multidimensional scenarios (such as PingER)
   5. Key-Value storages for PingER data in RDF
      1. This is Ibrahim’s work.

In the end, they want to compare all these approaches.

NUST

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.

Ibrahim

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+pingER+big+data+with+a+modified+pingtable+for+event-correlation+and+clustering.docx. Ibrahim reports 7/15/2014 "I have spent the last few months trying to understand the concept of big data storage and its retrieval as well as the traditional approach of storing RDF data. I have integrated a single hadoop cluster in our cloud. but for this project we need multiple clusters, which I have already discussed with Dr. Badrul and he will provide me with big storage for the experiment." No Update 8/20/2014.

"I have come up with initial proposed solution model. This model consists of several parts. The upper parts of the Figure below shows the data source, in which PingER data will be convert into RDF format. Then the data pre-processor will take care of converting RDF/XML into N-triples serialization formats using N-triples convertor module. This N-triple file of an RDF graph will be as an input and stores the triples in storage as a key value pair using MapReduce jobs"

Potential projects

See list of Projects

Coordinates of team members:

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