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Anjum, Hassaan Khaliq, Kashif-, Raja+, Johari+, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul, Ridzuan-, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib, Les+, Renan+, Bebo+
+ Confirmed attendance
- Responded but Unable to attend:
Actual attendees:
Hassaan, Raja, Johari, Saqib, Renan, Bebo, Les
Unfortunately we were unable to hear Saqib though he appeared to be present and responded to some messages.
Administration
- Johari proposes that UTM host a PingER workshop in 2014, maybe associated with another conference. Anjum will be in Malaysia then. Saqib will meet Hanan Jan 9th and discuss this. Johari will email Hanan also. After the meeting Johari sent email to the Les, Hanan, Saqib, Badrul, and Adib with the issues and suggesting a skype meeting
- We need to know if UTM is able to host it.
- Bebo suggested late September.
Adib suggested a summer school that
The summer school is aimed at graduate students and researchers from different disciplines where everyone needs to be present for team presentations based on case studies/assignments given to each team. Each team will be mentored by one professional researcher (from PingER Current Member) to guide and advise. The Summer School activities will include: Keynote talk, Presentations on current projects related to Pinger that open up challenges for students to solve and address, and case studies (assignments based on the presentations) for each team of students......
Adib
Anjum
is going to spend a year in Malaysia at UM. He awaits his visa. Dr Hassaan Khaliq will be taking over as the PingER Leader there.
Renan
plans to be at UM by January 28th, we all hope he has his visa by then.
Renan
Renan has contacted the admin (Vinicius) Renan is trying to contact the admin for the UFRJ PingER monitor, to see if it can be restored to a working state. Vinicius explained they went through infrastructure changes and there are some important hardware pieces missing, which is delaying the process. Vinicius explained that hopefully around mid-February they should have the necessary hardware so they can reinstall the systems and PingER program. So we
Renan has provided a 4 page Appendix on PingERLOD to the ICFA report. Renan has provided a 4 page Appendix on PingERLOD to the ICFA report. This is also available at PingER LOD Overview
Renan 's thesis has around 130 pages. However, almost half of it is about generic stuff about Semantic Web. The other half is specific about PingER LOD project. The Semantic Web generic stuff part should be translated because it is good material for those who want to study and understand more about it. The PingER LOD part should be translated for further documentation about the project we developed at SLAC. Things Renan needs to do:
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is testing Virtuoso which is free to see if it can overcome the slowness of the current PingERLOD. He plans to be done in the next 2 weeks. If this does not work we may need to look into a tool that costs money.
Renan is looking at submitting a paper or poster for a Big Data and Social Computing conference that will be held at Stanford: He is pretty sure he can argue that we have made nice contributions for social computing using (big) data handling technologies.
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He will discuss with his professor at Rio so she can help him with advice.
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Any help from a developer who would be able to engage him/herself to invest some time on the project would be very much appreciated.
Bebo will look at the conference information and the deadline to verify its relevance. Renan will look into whether he can get financial assistance to attend.
It would be good if somebody else was able to work with Renan to move PingER LOD forward. However we think the performance issue has to be resolved first.
UM
Ridzuan was unable to attend but sent the following status report: "My progress is that currently I am setting up the Hadoop environment to our UM servers. There have been some installation problems and will take some time to debug and testing Pinger data. We will start using Malaysia pinger data first as a starter. Will inform you the progress in our next meeting."
Badrul plans for his undergraduate student (Abdulrahim Haroun Ali) to have a draft paper on anomalies in PingER measurements to share for review by the end of semester (January).
UM appears to be experiencing very high packet losses (>4%). We need help in understanding these. It does not look like simple congestion since the jitter and RTT is staying low. Saqib needs assistance from Badrul as part of his case study of Malaysia. Badrul writes: "UM is now currently changing the new policy regarding the bandwidth and connection. They are upgrading the switch and router to a new router - mostly every weekend they shut down the network. therefore we are now having some difficulty." Saqib has identified what appear to be losses starting at a JARING router in KL. Badrul will run some mtr traceorute/pings to various sites.
UNIMAS
The IPDV jitter looks high for UNIMAS seen from SLAC in Nov & Dec. Saqib needs help from Johari to try and understand this. Could it be due to students? Johari does not recall any particular reason for the high jitter.
The UNIMAS monitor was
Renan is now working as a systems developer at his university at this moment so he is busy. He has plans to keep in touch with us and producing more work. Currently he is unsure he will have an outstanding productivity.
UM
Ridzuan reports his current progress is that he has considered using Apache Mahout (open source machine learning for big data) for the clustering on the Pinger data. Ridzuan, how did your tests with pingtable.pl go? Ridzuan is awaiting Renan decision on final implementation of RDF storage to be adopted.
- Renan reports that Ridzuan can definitely use PingER LOD data because it is constantly being updated, due to the chronological jobs. The main problem he will face is the slowness caused by the usage of Sesame (RDF Repository). The slowness is clearly shown on more complex queries, especially the ones that retrieve measurement data using many parameters (ex: a query that shows throughput, packet loss, and avg RTT from SLAC to all nodes in Malaysia, monthly, since August).
- Ridzuan may find it much faster and more support available if he uses pingtable.pl etc.
- Ridzuan agrees about the slowness. He will use PingER's text files via pingtable.pl etc. Les mentioned there are several for applications to access PingER data via the web.
Badrul plans for his undergraduate student (Abdulrahim Haroun Ali) to have a draft paper on anomalies in PingER measurements to share for review by the end of semester (January).
UNIMAS
Raspberry Pi was repaired with duct tape returned to computer center. However the heat of the device disolved the tape glue. Johari will get a replacment under warranty. The conclusion is that the Raspberry Pi is OK for a contrlled environment but not robust enough for rural areas such as the Kelabit Highlands.
The UNIMAS monitor was down over the new year. The problem was that the pinger2.pl file was moved. It is now workingwas restored, however it looks like was running an older version, it does not have the individual ping response just the min/avg/max. This will need investigating.. Johari has fixed this. He has also loaded the latest version of ping-data.pl that has better diagnostics.
The tool to enable synchronizing Malaysian monitors is completed. It provides the ability to add, edit and delete nodes. However there are still some errors (wild cards) in the pinger.xml file producedJohari has sent less the URLs to try out. Les has not had much time so far only looked at add form made some suggestions, and edit form - looks good. Johari is working on itauthentication for the tool. Once that is ready he will send to Badrul and Saqib.
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.
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.
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Saqib has finished his thesis. He is applying for a Postgraduate Research assistant-ship at UTM where he plans to work on PingER. He is still waiting to hear the result. Update?
Saqib is working with the IT department in UTM to solve the problems of delays in traceroute. They have a new ISP. Now the pinger server is working with single static IP (161.139.68.188) both for intranet and internet. Previous internet IP 161.139.146.158 is removed.
- No load balancing is involved as UTM is working with single ISP.
- Still the problem of the delay in traceroute is not solved. It appears to be due to the DNS lookup delay.
Saqib emailed has started a list of Potential PingER remote nodes in S. E Asia. They have been added to the all 3 Malaysian PingER monitors' HostLists. He has started a case study of Malaysian hosts seen from Malaysian Monitors.
UUM
case study of Malaysian hosts seen from Malaysian Monitors. the case study is identifying the need for the Malaysian monitors to collect traceroutes to their target hosts daily. SLAC has a script to facilitate this, for routes seen from SLAC, that could be adapted for other sites. The latest copy of the word file was shared with Badrul and Johari.
UUM
Dec 4, Dec 4, 2013: The director of computer centre has agreed to support this collaboration and already appointed one staff to be with us during the configuration. Next step, Adib needs to discuss with Prof. Suhaidi to dedicate one PC OR get support from Badrul grant to buy one PC for this purpose or have a bake sale and buy a Raspberry Pi. Adib will do his best to setup PingER monitoring host at UUM before the end of this year. Adib was not on the meeting. He provided an update by email: "Still waiting to get PC. But they promise to provide one very soon. it is totally beyond my control." Regarding the meeting, Adib will attend the upcoming meetings once UUM pinger host is up.
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At the Connect Asia Pacific Summit in Bangkok 2 weeks ago 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.
Anjum believes he can add two more PingER hosts, one at Bahawalpur the other at SahiwalHassaan is working with Anjum to get contacts at Bahawalpur and Sahiwal. These are in central Pakistan towards the Eastern border and so should help with providing TULIP landmarks. However with his impending move he has not had time to follow up. Hassaan will follow up with Anjum.
We were are unable to gather data from about 13 monitors in Pakistan. Three have been fixed. They will fix the remainder. The contact for QAU is on leave. New DVDs have been sent to DUHs
TULIP - Raja
We are looking to make the code open source and available via github. We will be discussing possible extensions and potential commercialization.
Raja has found a further ~48 perfSONAR landmarks mainly in Europe and N. America. We now have 228 active unique landmarks. He now checks for new landmarks on a monthly basis. We have also created Taiwan as another region for which we can get good location information. We now work for N. America, Europe, Pakistan and Taiwan.
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. It has been submitted.
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. This is delayed by finishing off the TULIP paper and the end of year PingER annual report for ICFA.
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 is going to go to the contacts office tomorrow to try and get things moving.
airuniversity, buitms, cae, duhs, pingerisl-air, pingerisl-qau, quest, uaf.
Monitors Status
Airuniversity New installation will be install in a week
Buitms Problem in hardware, they are trying to fix it
Cae Problem with IP, they are trying to resolve it
Duhs They are purchasing new servers in two week time
Pingerisl-air Hopefully it will be UP tomorrow
Pingerisl-qau Contact person is still on live
Quest Request for IP binding as seecs server has been sent
Uaf Problem in system, visit approval for Faisalabad University in progress
TULIP - Raja
We have sent email to Yahoo giving them an update on TULIP and how it might be extended to meet their needs.
Raja uses the options feature of traceroute.pl to reduce the time for the PingER/perfSONAR landmarks to make the pings by a factor of 5. Given this we probably need to review the timeouts.
We are looking at submitting a paper to IMC 2014. April 30, 2014 (see http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/imc/2014/cfp.html) is the submission date. this would discuss how TULIP works and share our experiences. Thus we might focus on: managing the appearance/disappearance of landmarks; the selecting of optimum timeouts for speedup plus any other ideas for speedup; where one could go next (e.g. colocation of landmarks on Yahoo, Google, Hotmail ... sites; impacts of heavy use and scaling (e.g. need for cluster for reflector, multiple landmarks at sites to not overwhelm a given landmark); concerns about network utilization); the relation of accuracy to landmark density (big item). Also more on potential uses such as visual traceroute, identifying proxies. Also maybe a bit more on the actual user interface (results from multiple sources besides TULIP) and implementation (parallel threads, tiering and adding new regions). The paper would assume we have a working TULIP as described in the other paper.
Raja has added 22 more PerfSONAR landmarks in North America and 1 in China.
Raja is working on a visual traceroute using TULIP to geolocate the routers. IT is incorporated in the TULIP front page at http://tulip.slac.stanford.edu. It is very slow (e.g. 10 mins) however we are working on populating a large cache of router location's to speed up.
PingER at SLAC
We are working on the annual PingER report for the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA). It is due mid January. We just need to incorporate the high performance monitoring section from Shawn McKee.
We have made some mods to the evaluation of min_RTT to eliminate bogus values that have impossible values of Directivity. This was to fix problems Saqib ran into with this Malaysia case studyhis Malaysia case study.
There is an upcoming meeting in Burkina Faso in November at which Les is invited to give lectures on the Internet, PingER, the digital Divide. In preparation for this we are looking at making a case study on West Africa using the monitoring host in Burkina Faso and have added Beacons in most West African countries.
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.
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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
Future meeting - Les
Next meeting Wednesday February 5th 2014 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday February 6th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday February 6th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday 6th February, 2014 02:00am Rio Standard Time.
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