20151216 SLAC SEECS and UNIMAS Meeting

Time & date 

Wednesday Dec 16th 2015 7:30pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Dec 17th 2015  8:30am Pakistan time, Thursday Dec 17th 2015 11:30am  Malaysian time, Thursday Dec17th  2015 01:30 am Rio Standard Time.  

Coordinates of team members:

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

Attendees

Invitees:

Hassaan Khaliq?,  Kashif, Raja,  Samad Riaz (SEECS); Johari+, Nara, Adnan Khan (UNIMAS); Abdullah, Badrul, Anjum,  Ridzuan, Ibrahim? (UM); Hanan,  Saqib (UTM); Adib, Fatima (UUM); Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Thiago, Les+, Bebo- (SLAC).

Note change of time since US no longer on daylight saving (summer) time, and need to accommodate Johari.

+ Confirmed attendance

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

? Individual emails sent

Actual attendees:

Anjum, Les

Administration

• Membership of pinger-my in https://groups.google.com

• Hassaan reports "I have received revisions on my proposal and these days I am revising my proposal. 

  • In the meantime he has also added another student (Anas Abrar) on this project. He is in learning phase and will follow the nodes which are not working. He shall give us an update very soon. 

  • He is  very hopeful that if the proposal is accepted then we can easily have a full time RA for the project.

  • However, Anjum points out it may take a while to get acceptance and funding (e.g. 6 months)

• NETAPPS2015 1-3 December 2015 was very successful, five papers were presented in the PingER session 
  
  • PingER Malaysia-Internet Performance Measuring Project: A Case Study, Saqib Ali, R. Les Cottrell, Anjum Naveed, presented at NetApps2015, Dec 2015 
  • Applying Data Warehousing and Big Data Techniques to Analyze Internet Performance, Thiago Barbosa, Renan Souza, Sergio Serra, R. Les Cottrell presented at NetApps2015, Dec 2015 
  • Worldwide Internet performance measurements using a Raspberry Pi, presented at NetApps2015, Dec 2015.  Also a video.
  • Adaptive Geolocation of Internet Hosts, Raja A. A. Khan, Anjum Naveed, R. Les Cottrell presented at NetApps2015, Dec 2015
  • Survey on Big Data Indexing strategies, Fatima Bintu Adama, Adib Habbal, Suhaidi Hassan, R. Les Cottrell. Bebo White, Ibrahim Abdullahi.
  • Anjum reports there was a huge crowd from 15 countries, it provided good publicity for PingER. In particular there was interest from Jordan and Sri Lanka and a person in UUM
    • After NETAPPS, Adib received several requests from undergraduate students to do their internship (practicum) on PingER related projects.  Hopefully, at least two of them will get the school approval and they will be placed in UUM InterNetWorks lab under my supervision. The internship will start in Feb and the proposed project is PingER IPv6. In addition, one network engineer from HP was very interested in PingER. After a short discussion with him, he has decided to pursue his master study and work on project related to PingER. I have shared PingER future projects link with him and currently he is waiting for an official letter of admission as a master student. The topic is not yet decided and open to our group to suggest.
      
  • Unfortunately Anjum and Saqib were unable to link up since Saqib was only able to be present on the last day.
  • Currently, NetApps organizers are  in the process of sending NETAPPS2015 proceedings to be indexed in the major indexing services.

• 9 students from Amity University near New Delhi in India interested in coming to SLAC. Bebo sent reminder recently, response below:

  • Sorry for the delay.  Students are giving end semester exams.  They are busy till dec 20th. They will get back to work as soon as the exams  are done. Once the exam is over we will be setting up  "PingER measurement agent at Amity"

  • Three students have written a short paper for confluence. 

    • Analysis and clustering PingER network data

    • Application for the emulation of pinger on Android devices

    • Correlation analysis  on Real Time  Tab Delimited  Network monitoring data

  • Btech computer science students   would be graduating in May 2016.  Their visas can be arranged after May 2016.

  • Jahin Majumdar ( Btech computer science student) already has an 5 year F1 student Visa for University of Florida since he will be completing his 8th semester in that university. He will be completing his semester at Florida in May as well

• Joao a Brazillian student identified by Renan is interested in a 3 month internship at SLAC similar to those completed  by Renan and Thiago.
  • "IIE took some time to send me the information I asked, but now I think I have all I need. They sent me an e-mail two days ago with the informations about academic training and they will send me another e-mail as soon as my Letter of Support is avaiable. The academic training verification form is already avaiable, however they asked the students to wait for the upcoming webinar where they will give instructions about the academic training and how to fill the academic training form. As soon as my form is complete, I will need your signature in it. Also, I´m sending you my health insurance document attached in this e-mail." 

Geolocation Anjum, 

• This is a proposed project for one of the Indian students.

Android - Bebo 

Bebo has set up a Github codebase  as a new project. It contains the PingER MA (pinger2.pl and the traceroute/ping server).Anyone  needs to sign up for a Github account (if you don't already have one), so you can be added as a project member.

• slac-pinger/pinger created by topherwhite.  PingER project https://github.com/slac-pinger/pinger
• Now we have it we can share with Amity to check it works.

Saqib

• Saqib has a  5  MS students from the Database team

  • Farah Massoud

  • Sabah Massoumil working on Linked Open Data (please excuse spelling)

  • Aqsa Hameed working on big data/analysis of PingER data

  • Aqsa Hameed has been working with Anjum to look at a project to create a Hadoop/Cloudera PingER warehouse to enable easier, more powerful access to PingER historical data. 

    • Thinking a bit on Aqsa her work appears to be related to the work done by Thiago on PingER warehouse using a cluster/Cloudera/HDFS/Impala earlier this year. In particular see the presentation at NETAPPS2015 (see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/123309267/NETAPPS_PRESENTATIONrevLuiza.pptx. Once the paper is published we can also provide her with that (Adib will let us know when this is OK). 

      Further we are working on repeating the interns at SLAC of Renan and Thiago with another Brazilian student Joao this coming year.  Thus maybe we can provide some continuity of effort.

    •  Les will email the relevant people to put them in contact.

• Saqib has submitted a project with title "A Fundamental Active Internet Performance Monitoring Framework for Pakistan Education & Research Network (PERN) in University of Agriculture, Faisalabad"

  • Project is accepted.

  • working on a project to develop a node using Raspberry Pi 2 and IoT to measure the air and soil quality.

  • Currently, students are analyzing the project to develop a problem statement for their research project.Saqib has 5 students interested in PingER. In particular in Big Data, Data Mining and Geolocation.

• For the GeoLocation Saqib should contact Anjum

UUM

Fatima  presented her work at NetApps. Fatima has passed her master oral examination (Viva) with minor correction and she is submitting her final dissertation coming Sunday to UUM school of computing. Indeed, we are very grateful to PingER team members support and help. Currently, Fatima is planning to pursue her PhD and possibly on a topic related to her master dissertation. We need PingER team suggestion and advice before we can decide on the topic. I will attend next meeting to further discuss on this.

UM

Ibrahim has extracted the  PingER Zip manually. He is reconstructing 11Gb of data, has 15GBytes of data there. He is trying to use SPAR to classify the data. He alsop was looking at RDF. the next step si to use MapReduce to organize and reduce the output of dataso can vizualize it. He will be using a the same techniques he used for looking at 1996-2006 weather data.  However at the moment he cannot access his  VMs from myren for the last two weeks, even for the myren site, He has emailed  them but till now they have not fixed the issue.  He has updated all his data in their cloud. 

UNIMAS

UTM

Johari has had no response from UTM so far. Not sure whether they still want to be in the project. Last straw, need to contact someone from the network group so that they understand and appreciate the Pinger project

Saqib reports:

"Faculty management in the Faculty of Computing-UTM is changed. They ask me to re-locate the PingER server from the faculty server room as students are not allowed for physical access of the server room. Only faculty members are allowed to physically manage the servers in the server room.  Therefore, I asked my supervisor (Dr Md Asri Ngadi/ Prof Hanan) from UTM to take  the responsibility of the server. He is agreed, however, I have to manage the server remotely. Further, he needs an official invitation from your side to fulfill the official requirements. Further, he wants to make this project as a source of an international collaboration and linkages between UTM and SLAC-Stanford."

Les sent back:

The UTM PingER server is part of a worldwide collaboration led by SLAC that includes about 70 sites in over 20 countries. These sites  are monitoring on-going Internet end-to-end performance , both currently and in the past with a history of 18 years of collected data.

SLAC is happy to host postgraduate students from UTM  for a period of up to a year to contribute to this project as visiting scientists.

The students participate in collaborative research and development on the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) project to monitor, analyze and present information on the end-to-end performance of Internet links. This project includes researching and developing techniques to optimize the measurements for the purposes of characterizing the “Digital Divide”. Dr. Les. Cottrell of SLAC’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is the  host.  All  support for the visit is provided by sources other than SLAC. 

The students are expected to comply with all policies and procedures, including safety guidelines.  Your mentor will provide them with any specific policies, procedures or safety guidelines for their assigned area. As a program participant, the student does not  enter an employee/employer relationship with DOE, SLAC or any other federal agency.

MYREN

No update 8/12/2015, no Update 9/2/2015. 

perfsonar-unimas.myren.net.my is back up and running

We have been unable to gather data from pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my  since September 11th, 2015 pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my. It is pingable  however there is no response from http://pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?function=ping&target=www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu&options=-i%200.2

NUST

Hassaan reports "I have received revisions on my proposal and these days I am revising my proposal. In the meanwhile, I have also added another student (Anas Abrar) on this project. He is in learning phase and will follow the nodes which are not working. I shall give you an update very soon. "

•  I am very hopeful that if the proposal is accepted then we can easily have a full time RA for the project.

Hassaan has re-submitted the proposal after revisions. He would like to get Anas Abrar more trained on monitoring operation and then will inform us to add him to the mailing list at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php.

PingER at SLAC

Bebo is looking at setting up a Github with the PingER monitoring code and traceoute.pl.

• Working on the following hosts to be able to gather data 

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Wednesday Jan 6th 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Jan 7th, 2016  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Jan 7th 2016 12:00noon Malaysian time, Thursday Jan 7th 2016 02:00am Rio Standard Time.  

Old Items

• Oct 2015. Following the last meeting, Anjum, Hassaan and Les met to discuss the way forward. 

  • "Adnan currently is unable to find resources for handling the project. Similarly, there is no progress on hiring of a full time RA by NUST HQ. 
  • However, I (Hassaan) checked from HEC about the proposal that I submitted last year. They have informed me that 2 reviewers have asked for revisions while they are waiting for the third review. I am very hopefull about it. If the proposal is accepted then we can easily have a full time RA for the project. I have plans to talk to Dr. Zaidi about hiring an RA on assuming that our proposal will be accepted by HEC. We can then get his salary deducted later from the HEC project. I shall update you very soon in this regard." 

  • Hassaan is  waiting to hear from HEC about the comments on the proposal. 

  • Moreover, he has asked a student to work on the project for the time being. His name is Mian Anas however he will need few weeks to understand the project. 

• Thiago completed setting up the  PingER data SQL Impala warehouse running on a Nebula/Cloudera cluster using the Hadoop File System (HDFS). Unfortunately it is not currently accessible from outside SLAC. There have been several attempts to provide outside access, but no success yet, we need to engage the subject matter experts. Thiago is now a SLAC associate so he still has an account at SLAC. There was a cyber security alert on the version of java installed with Cloudera. Les has replaced the cloudera version of java which should fix the vulnerability. However the new version has not been tested.

Geolocation

Anjum believes the TULIP Geolocation application  can be improved significantly. At least there are few ideas that we can try. For this, either a group of undergraduate students or an active masters student is required. The resultant work can easily be the thesis of masters level. Who is interested? 

• Saqib at Faisalabad has an MS student interested to work on Geolocation project. He requests an initial  paper on the project.  Les has responded to Saqib. He also has some other students. Anjum will contact him. Potential projects/asks include: take over management of PingER monitoring in Pakistan (say 5 monitors/student; case study of how Pakistan's network performance/connectivity has improved over thea years especially as function of funding etc;  geolocation with variable alpha; indoor geolocation

• Johari will contact Anjum to learn more of the requirements. Update Johari/Adnan

• See http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/tulip/. Basically TULIP uses pings to a target from landmarks at known locations and converts the minimum RTTs to estimate the distances. Then uses the distances with mulitlateration to estimate the location of the target

• To improve TULIP one needs the right selection of landmarks, i.e. good (working landmarks) at the right locations (not too far from the target), straddling the target, and with a a reasonable estimate of the indirectness (directivity or alpha) of the path from the landmark to the target (so we can reasonably accurately estimate the distance). One also needs a reasonable density of landmarks (e.g. number of targets/100,000sq km)

• The landmarks come from PingER and perfSONAR sites.  We have a reasonable density in the US, Pakistan and Europe. Currently Anjum is getting better than 20km accuracy for Pakistani targets

• As the number of landmarks goes up so does the accuracy, but so does the time to make the measurements (pings). 

• One needs to find the optimal density

• Anjum proposes to speed up the measurements using a cluster for parallelization and also proposes to improve the adaptation of alpha based region. He regards the adaptive geolocation and parallelization as  MS projects. 

• He is also interested in geolocation in small proximity (e.g.indoors), e.g. using cell tower signals. This is a new area of research. It is possible that the port of PingER to an Android could  be related to this. This is a PhD project

• Anjum reports he can supervise the students on Geolocation. He will need to know when the students are ready. We can start with a joint meeting involving Les and the students. Later on, Anjum can have the meeting with students every week while Les can join if he has time.

NUST/SEECS Pakistani PingER nodes status

Pink Background indicates host was bad last month, strike through says it is fixed, yellow is an new bad host.

Is it time to start paring down the list of PingER monitor hosts in Pakistan, starting with those that have been down for a while and despite your efforts they are not cooperating.  One might also look at the coverage by region in Pakistan and try and keep good coverage for all regions.

Traceroute at UTM 5/9/2015

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.

Linked Open Data

Cristiane reports (7/1/2015): "I am trying to automatize the triplification of PingER data on Kettle. For now, part of the transformation is made on Kettle and another is made by a Java code. Although this solution works for a data sample, is important to have the entire process on Kettle because it facilitates to understand, modify and control the triplification process."

Feb 2015

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. 

Aug 2014

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. 

Cristiane has studied the PinGER data and how to cast it into Linked Open Data form. The size of the PingER hourly data for 1998-Sep 2014 archived via FTP in text form amounts to ~ 5.12GB and this corresponds to 15.66*10^9 (billion) triples. Then using 5  triples for each measurement and using Turtle without compression gives us 685 Gbytes or an inflation factor of ~ 200. 

When Christiane made the estimation of PingER triples, she wrote two documents that explain the process but they were in Portuguese. She has written the new versions in English.

• Counting PingER Measurements: https://www.dropbox.com/s/35itp7v6yasy3rb/Counting%20PingER%20Measurements%20_EnglishVersion.docx?dl=0
• PingER LOD Triples: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4oj5jqupwbujja5/PingERLOD%20Triples%20_EnglishVersion.docx?dl=0

Christiane's report is at: Size Inflation of PingER Data for use in PingER LOD

UM

Moved here 3/4/2015:

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. 

Anjum reported that UM had experienced a TCP syn DOS attack prior to Mar 12th (when an IDS was put in place). It occurred mainly for several days before between the hours on noon- 2pm and 7-7 in the evening (Malaysia time). He suggested looking to see if PingER could spit the effect.  Ibrahim, Les and Anjum will look at. Les analyzed the data and sent it to Anjum

NUST

The following is from Samad 2/24/2015.

• buitms.seecs.edu.pk #We have to disable gathering data from this host because the person still don't want to continue with us as i have tried once again to convince him but the answer is same. Les has disabled from SLAC. 
• nukhimain.seecs.edu.pk # We were unable to gather data since 20th November, 2014 and now the Node is working fine and collecting data as well. 
• pinger.uettaxila.edu.pk #The node is working fine from last two weeks. 
• sau.seecs.edu.pk. #This Node is working fine now. 
• pingerjms.pern.edu.pk #This node is working now. 
• pinger.uet.edu.pk # this was also not working from so many days. and now its working fine and collecting data as well. 
• pinger.isra.edu.pk # This node is also working fine now.
• pingerlhr-pu.pern.edu.pk # This is also working fine now.
• pinger.kohat.edu.pk # Collecting data now.

• The IP of "pingerqta.pern.edu.pk" has been changed, Les has updated the databas at SLAC with the following

  DNS: pingerqta.pern.edu.pk 

  Old IP: 121.52.157.157 

  New IP: 121.52.157.148

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