Tuesday October 1, 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Wednesday October 2 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Wednesday October 2 11:00am Malaysian time.
Invitees: Adib, Anjum+, Kashif, Raja+, Johari+, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul-, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib, Les+, Renan+, Bebo+
+ Confirmed attendance
- Responded but Unable to attend: Badrul unable to attend, son admitted to hospital.
Johari is looking for a Research Assistant for 24 months for his research grant. If he has no success he will see if he can do something with NUST. He has an undergraduate who is looking at Geoflow to make better visualizations of PingER. Geoflow will be released end of this year, early next year. Johari is doubtful the student will complete this.
Badrul has received the grant from his proposal. It amounts to 46K RM. It will pay travel for Johari and Adib plus a Malaysian research assistant at UM.
We discussed sending undergraduate student to study for a few months (like Renan did) for example at SLAC. It is regarded as a great idea to give exposure etc. but funding will be hard. There are exchange programs with RMIT in Australia and the University of Warwick in the UK. NUST has exchange students. The students have to pay their own travel.
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 the form executing the map. Renan reports that the bugs should be easy to fix. He has talked to his professor who suggested trying RDF OWLIM, 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:
Johari did not attend but sent an update after the meeting.
The Raspberry pi Single Board Computer (SBC) has been moved to the UNIMAS Computer Center (CC). It has a public IP address. It is collecting data, the data is available via http://pinger2.unimas.my/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl . The ping server is working at http://pinger2.unimas.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?function=ping but not the traceroute server at http://pinger2.unimas.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl (same problem as before). They know (sort of) the problem but haven't got the chance to rectify it (mapping NAT address, need to be done from centre computer centre).
We are now using two monitoring hosts at UNIMAS. This will enable us to look for differences/anomalies possibly due to the use of the raspberry Pie. The first pinger node resides within the faculty network, further away from the pinger2 node which is located at the data centre and closer to the gateway.
A quick comparison of the performance of the two hosts without statistical quantification is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY. Johari will prepare a comparison table in term of hardware and software between the nodes, and will put that in the website. Quantifying the differences and adding more data as it becomes available could be student project.
On the research grant, good news is they managed to get (persuade/force) someone to register as master by research student for the research grant obtained under the FRGS scheme. Duration max of 18 months, and will update on the kind of work he will be doing with regards to the pinger project,
Johari is having problems creating an ISO image to simplify distribution using Ubuntu. He will try another linux version.
Saqib has finished his thesis. He is applying for a Postgraduate Research assistant-ship at UTM where he plans to work on PingER. He has asked Les to write a letter of recommendation. Les has sent a letter. Saqib will apply in the next two weeks, then probably another 2 weeks to the decision.
Saqib was starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia. In particular hosts which are unreliable, hosts with large (>1) values of Directivity, host with large RTTs, hosts with large unreachability or losses etc. Les had some questions on the locations of some sites that have impossible values of Directivity. One has been Disabled, any word on Allianze? What about QIUP? Saqib will investigate.
Hanan and Saqib met with Hossein Javedani of UTM who was interested in anomaly detection in PingER data. We have sent him a couple of papers and how to access the PingER data. Hossein now plans to join the PingER project before the next meeting.
Raja has the Tulip map working, the laundering is working. He has contacted Kashif to try and improve the number of working landmarks in Pakistan. He now has > 200 active landmarks of which 110 are perfSONAR, 40 are PingER.
Next Raja will compare the speed of various ways to perform trilateration for N. America and Europe.
Anjum will check why many Pakistani landmarks are not working and give us an update by next week.
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:
Follow up from workshop
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.
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.
Next meeting Tuesday 22 October 2013 8:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Wednesday 23 October 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Wednesday 23 October 2013 11:00 am Malaysian time, Wednesday 23 October 2013 01:00am Rio time.
See: http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php