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The NUST Institute of Information Technology has been playing its part for more than three years by maturing a collaborative research initiative with SLAC, USA. With expected growth in bandwidths, PERN will also be able to benefit from more advanced tools being developed by SLAC and its collaborators in the US and Europe. The interdisciplinary composition of this proposal encompasses the following: computer networking, software engineering, statistical analysis, high energy physics/science and geopolitics.
The benefits to the US are:
- New visualization, topology, navigation, forecasting, event detection, alerting, and diagnosis tools for perfSONAR which will make perfSONAR increasingly attractive and useful and networkers and users dramatically more efficient in understanding and debugging network problems;
- Today perfSONAR is more of a middleware architecture, it needs useful visualization tools to enable users to understand the network and rich information available from perfSONAR.
- Though users and networkers today have traceroute, one also needs more complex network topology tools to discover layer 1 and 2 paths, and to interrogate devices along the path.
- Forecasting is critical for applications such as grid data replication site selection and to enable event detection;
Wiki Markup Network administrators cannot review thousands of graphs each morning (e.g. multiple sites, interfaces, metrics, paths etc.) looking for anomalies/events. They need automated detection and alerting of significant, persistent changes. Today the network adminsitrators mainly detect whether a link is up or not. As network performance increases and one approaches high reliability this will need to change to not just on/off but to more subtle performance changes. As we have shown elsewhere \[5\] changes in routes (layer 3), though important, often occur without impact on the performance of a path, and many serious performance changes occur without route changes.- Having found an event, experience shows that are many steps that the diagnoser needs to go through. Many of these can be automated and tentative conclusions drawn thus simplifying the task of the network diagnosers.
- Important testing, debugging and documentation for the perfSONAR collaboration (funded partially by the US);
- Closer collaboration of users such as SLAC High Energy Physicists, LHC (funded partially by the US) collaborators with network administrators at end sites and in the Internet Service providers;
- Increased coverage of worldwide networks for international debugging of network problems.
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\[1\] NIIT will be funded out of a separate grant from the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC).
\[2\] The perfSONAR framework is supported by the perfSONAR consortium ([http://www.perfsonar.net]) recently initiated by the joint collaboration of Internet2, the European Union-funded GEANT2 project, the DoE energy Sciences Network (ESNet), Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Since NIIT is working in strong collaboration with SLAC, PERN shall be able to benefit from the experience of our collaboration by virtue of PETWORK.
\[3\] Network diagnostics tools such as OWAMP, NDT, BWCTL (a scheduler for iperf) have proven to be vital for Internet2 to understand the performance trends and in solving network performance problems.
\[4\] The Pakistan NIIT and National Center for Physics (NCP) sites are both building Grid clusters to provide services for the LHC, and so will need both excellent networking for data distribution, and perfSONAR in Pakistan to diagnose network problems end-to-end.
\[5\] "Correlating Internet Performance Changes and Route Changes to Assist in Trouble-shooting from an End-user Perspective", C. Logg, J. Navratil, R. L. Cottrell, PAM 2004 (see in particular Table 1). |