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Anjum believes he can add two more PingER hosts, one at Bahawalpur the other at Sahiwal. These are in central Pakistan towards the Eastern border and so should help with providing TULIP landmarks.
Anjum is going to spend a year in Malaysia. Dr, Hassaan will be taking over as the PingER Leader there.
TULIP - Raja
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We are looking to make the code open source and available via github. We will be discussing possible extensions and potential commercialization.
Raja has made Raja has made lots of measurements and created cumulative probability distribution functions of how the new TULIP with adapting alpha (in distance = Alpha*100(km/ms)*min_RTT(ms)) according to region and min_RTT compares to databases and Constraint Based Geolocation and Single Ping etc. He has also added information on the impact of landmark density on accuracy.
Raja has put together a paper on TULIP. Next step is to submit it.
To first order (due to the number of landmarks available) it only works in N. America, Europe and Pakistan. Even then it is only accurate to a hundred or so km. It also will not work for targets that do not respond to pings or are connected via geo-stationary satellites. Its main use at the moment maybe to find roughly the location, i.e. region/country/state, a target is in. This is particularly useful for proxies and for routers (the latter are typically mis-found by GeoIPtools to be in the corporate HQ of the owner (e.g. Berkeley for ESnet routers). It would be really valuable if router owners provided DNS LOC records filled out.
As Raja's work on TULIP begins to go into testing he will be engaging more with Renan and Linked Open Data. Raja has sent email to Renan and has a list of things from Renan that Raja should look at.
PingER at SLAC
Les tried again with UFRJ (12/5/2013), making sure Renan is on the email so Renan can go beat on the door of the UFRJ contact. There was no response, Renan can you help?
Zakaria of Zayed university in Dubai copied Prof. Wathiq Mansoor of the American University in Dubai. Wathiq responded with interest, Les sent him information (basically http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/letters/invite-monitor.doc). However the site does not appear to respond to pings. Les has not heard anything back from Wathig after informing him of the ping situation. Reminder sent 11/2/2013. Bebo will follow up on this.
We are working on the annual PingER report for the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA). It is due mid January.
We made case studies of: the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cuba upgrading from GEOS to terrestrial fibre optic links,
Old Items
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 responeses 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:
- A task/process flow writing all java classes involved on all those batch jobs;
- 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.
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.
Follow up from workshop
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As Raja's work on TULIP begins to go into testing he will be engaging more with Renan and Linked Open Data. Raja has sent email to Renan and has a list of things from Renan that Raja should look at.
PingER at SLAC
Les tried again with UFRJ (12/5/2013), making sure Renan is on the email so Renan can go beat on the door of the UFRJ contact. There was no response, Renan can you help?
Zakaria of Zayed university in Dubai copied Prof. Wathiq Mansoor of the American University in Dubai. Wathiq responded with interest, Les sent him information (basically http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/letters/invite-monitor.doc). However the site does not appear to respond to pings. Les has not heard anything back from Wathig after informing him of the ping situation. Reminder sent 11/2/2013. Bebo will follow up on this.
We are working on the annual PingER report for the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA). It is due mid January.
We made case studies of: the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cuba upgrading from GEOS to terrestrial fibre optic links, and a comparison of PingER derived throughputs vs those of Speedtest.net (see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Comparison+of+Speedtest.net+download+speeds+versus+PingER+Derived+throughputs).
Old Items
TULIP
The new beta test TULIP site is up and running and is at http://tulip.slac.stanford.edu. To first order (due to the number of landmarks available) it only works in N. America, Europe and Pakistan. Even then it is only accurate to a hundred or so km. It also will not work for targets that do not respond to pings or are connected via geo-stationary satellites. Its main use at the moment maybe to find roughly the location, i.e. region/country/state, a target is in. This is particularly useful for proxies and for routers (the latter are typically mis-found by GeoIPtools to be in the corporate HQ of the owner (e.g. Berkeley for ESnet routers). It would be really valuable if router owners provided DNS LOC records filled out.
There was interest in TULIP from Mridul Jain <mridul@yahoo-inc.com>and the Senior Architect in Yahoo! R&D Software Dev in Bangalore, India. He pointed to an interesting paper on Geolocation using CBG and then finding hosts in the area and getting their area codes and using a virtual landmarks making traceroutes. The paper is at https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yong.pdf. He wants something to use in production, however I do not think we are ready.
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 responeses 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:
- A task/process flow writing all java classes involved on all those batch jobs;
- 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.
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
...
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.
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/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.
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/
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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
Anjum mentioned a paper on Evaluation of IP Geolocation Algorithms on PingER and PlanetLab Infrastructures, by Fida Gilani et. al. submitted to IEEE INFOCOM 2011. This could be updated with new data and maybe submitted to a different venue. Anjum forwarded a copy of the paper to Johari, Abdullah and Hanan with copies to the team. The idea is to see whether there is interest at UTM, UM or UNIMAS.
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.
There was interest in TULIP from Mridul Jain <mridul@yahoo-inc.com>and the Senior Architect in Yahoo! R&D Software Dev in Bangalore, India. He pointed to an interesting paper on Geolocation using CBG and then finding hosts in the area and getting their area codes and using a virtual landmarks making traceroutes. The paper is at https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yong.pdf. He wants something to use in production, however I do not think we are ready.
Potential projects
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