Page History

Setting

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expectations 

Given that we have measurements from SLAC to most countries in the world, we can translate them to indicate what connectivity is likely to most countries in he the world for various types of applications such as email, web, VoIP, holding Skype meetings, data transfer rates etc. this is very valuable for

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• travellers to meetings
• longer term visitors etc
• collaborators
  • As SLAC has diversified from an HEP site there are an increased number of scientists interested in collaborating with SLAC. This is particularly so for developing regions such as Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America etc. PingER with its emphasis on the Digital Divide is well positioned to provide relevant performance information
  • In addition there are scientific centers of interest to SLAC in developing regions. These include the future telescopes in Chile, the SESAME synchrotron Lab in Jordan and in particular from Africa
    • There is the Square Kilometer Array[1] with cores in Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia
    , telescopes in Chile, the SESAME synchrotron Lab in Jordan etc
    • costing €1.5 billion, with construction starting 2016, and initial observations 2019. The network traffic requirements are equivalent to ten times the Internet traffic today.
    • Aug 30, 2012: CERN donated 220 computer servers from CERN to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana[2].
    • Strategic plan for a synchrotron light source in southern Africa[3] championed by SLAC’s own Herman Winick
    • Drugs from rain-forest, environment studies, geo-physics
    • Six HEP International Conferences in Madagascar[4]
    
    

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    [1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

    [2] See http://euroafrica-ict.org/2012/08/30/cern-to-deliver-220-computers-servers-to-ghana

    [3] See http://vector.nsbp.org/2012/02/04/synchrotron-science-on-the-move-in-south-africa/

    [4] See http://www.globaleventslist.elsevier.com/events/2014/01/6th-high-energy-physics-international-conference-hep-mad-13/

  • Bear in mind 

    More funding and better Internet connectivity access are helping [Africa]. The number of scientific papers produced by Africans has tripled in the past decade, to over 55,400 in 2013 according to Reed Elsevier. That still only accounts for 2.4% of the world’s total but is quite a jump. The quality is rising too. From Economist  August 9^th, 2014.

• collaboration examples
  • Several High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments have introduced the concept of regional computer centers. Typically there a few of these (e.g. BaBar regional computer centers in France, Italy and the U.K. as well as the main center at SLAC). These centers are expected to perform much of the computing required by the collaboration and so need good connectivity to the experiment in order to get a copy of the data and to be able to share the results. By using PingER to measure the loss and RTT, we are able to provide expectations for the performance for bulk data transfer and other applications.
  • When putting together the Particle Physic Data Grid (PPDG) proposal (a collaboration of 3 universities and 6 Labs), it was very valuable to be able to look at the PingER data and evaluate what the performance between the sites would be like with the existing production links. As a result of this we put together a web site for the PPDG collaboration focussed on the PingER results for the collaborators.

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