20151007 SLAC SEECS and UNIMAS Meeting

Time & date 

Wednesday October 7th 2015 9:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday Oct 8th  2015  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Oct 8th 2015 noon Malaysian time, Thursday  Thursday October 8th , 2015 02:00am Rio Standard Time.  

Coordinates of team members:

See: http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php

Attendees

Invitees:

Hassaan Khaliq?, Kashif, Raja,  Samad Riaz (SEECS); Johari-, Nara, Adnan Khan (UNIMAS); Abdullah, Badrul, Anjum+, Ridzuan, Ibrahim+ (UM); Hanan, Saqib- (UTM); Adib+, Fatima+ (UUM); Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Thiago, Les+, Bebo+ (SLAC)

+ Confirmed attendance

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

? Individual emails sent

Actual attendees:

Anjum, Fatima, Ibrahim, Bebo, Les, Adib was unable to attend due to an overrunning NetApps meeting

Administration

• Membership of pinger-my in https://groups.google.com

• We are working with Dr Zaidi the new head of SEECS to investigate resources need to continue support of PingER in Pakistan. We communicated first week in August. No word since. Sent a reminder 8/1/2015. We had a rump meeting of Anjum, Hassaan and Les to discuss the way forward. Hassaan is waiting to hear from HEC about the comments on the proposal. 

• NETAPPS2015: Adib reports "We have received some good number of submissions and the reviewing process have started already. we will have a committee meeting tomorrow at the same time of PINGER group meeting. I will update you afterward."
  

  • Four papers were submitted related to PingER August 25th

  • Anjum submitted a paper to NETAPPS2015 "Adaptive Geolocation of Internet Hosts". There is no word on acceptance of paper. The evaluation was complete by 23rd September. It has been accepted.

  • Les, Thiago, Johari, Bebo and Topher White submitted a paper on "Worldwide Internet Performance Measurements Using Lightweight Measurement Platforms". We have heard nothing on acceptance.

  • Saqib submitted a paper "PingER Malaysia-Internet Performance Measuring Project: A Case Study". Saqib has been notified that it has been accepted. Now trying for some funding to attend the workshop.

  • Thiago and the Brazilian team submitted a paper on "Applying Data Warehousing and Big Data Techniques to Analyze Internet Performance'. Adib has kindly come up with a way in which the authors are unlikely to be able to attend, so somebody else will present. This has been accepted. Thiago is working on responding to the reviewer comments and is updating the paper.

• Bebo has potentially 9 students from Amity University near New Delhi in India interested in coming to SLAC for 3 months starting Feb until May. All expenses paid by them. They can start working remotely on project immediately. We are looking at what they can be involved in:  PingER (e.g. data warehouse project follow on with Brazil, Maris is excited about this), Android port of PingER MA with Topher, Geolocation with Anjum (Anjum is interested),  others on big data, monitoring, high performance throughput etc. However to come to SLAC they will need a US visa and they are still undergraduates so SLAC cannot sponsor them for a visa.  Bebo is contacting the students to see whether any of them already have a BS or equivalent (or higher).  Or whether any have a US visa or knows how to get one without SLAC sponsorship.  A possibility is that they collaborate remotely until they get a degree and/or can get a visa..

• At a previous meeting, we discussed the potential for an undergraduate from UM spending 6 months at SLAC as an intern. SLAC would be very interested, however SLAC cannot sponsor a J1 visa for anyone who does not have the equivalent of a US bachelors degree. Anjum will pass this on and pursue from the UM end.  It does nor appear promising, we will drop it.

• Renan identified a potential Brazilian student for next year.  We have responded to Rena that we are very interested.

• Need to move next meeting(s)  30 minutes earlier in future to accomodate Johari's schedule.

Geolocation Anjum, 

• Anjum believes the TULIP Geolocation application  can be improved significantly. At least there are few ideas that we can try. For this, either a group of undergraduate students or an active masters student is required. The resultant work can easily be the thesis of masters level. Who is interested? 

  • Saqib at Faisalabad has an MS student interested to work on Geolocation project. He requests an initial  paper on the project.  Les has responded to Saqib. He also has some other students. Anjum will contact him. Potential projects/asks include: take over management of PingER monitoring in Pakistan (say 5 monitors/student; case study of how Pakistan's network performance/connectivity has improved over thea years especially as function of funding etc;  geolocation with variable alpha; indoor geolocation

  • Johari will contact Anjum to learn more of the requirements. Update Johari/Adnan

  • See http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/tulip/. Basically TULIP uses pings to a target from landmarks at known locations and converts the minimum RTTs to estimate the distances. Then uses the distances with mulitlateration to estimate the location of the target

  • To improve TULIP one needs the right selection of landmarks, i.e. good (working landmarks) at the right locations (not too far from the target), straddling the target, and with a a reasonable estimate of the indirectness (directivity or alpha) of the path from the landmark to the target (so we can reasonably accurately estimate the distance). One also needs a reasonable density of landmarks (e.g. number of targets/100,000sq km)

  • The landmarks come from PingER and perfSONAR sites.  We have a reasonable density in the US, Pakistan and Europe. Currently Anjum is getting better than 20km accuracy for Pakistani targets

  • As the number of landmarks goes up so does the accuracy, but so does the time to make the measurements (pings). 

  • One needs to find the optimal density

  • Anjum proposes to speed up the measurements using a cluster for parallelization and also proposes to improve the adaptation of alpha based region. He regards the adaptive geolocation and parallelization as  MS projects. 

  • He is also interested in geolocation in small proximity (e.g.indoors), e.g. using cell tower signals. This is a new area of research. It is possible that the port of PingER to an Android could  be related to this. This is a PhD project

  • Anjum reports he can supervise the students on Geolocation. He will need to know when the students are ready. We can start with a joint meeting involving Les and the students. Later on, Anjum can have the meeting with students every week while Les can join if he has time.

Android - Bebo

• Bebo said Topher would be interested in getting a student to port PingER to an Android. Possibly one of the Chinese students. Les put out a version of the PingER MA on Github at https://github.com/iepm/ in 2013 as part of coordinating with Google( which did not get very far). It has been dormant since it was put out there. Les is not a github expert or user so is  unclear how complete it is or who can access it.   Can somebody test and if not available let Les know what to do. 

• Topher  is at home for 2 weeks, he will set up a shareable Github for PingER files.

Unrest in Malaysia - Anjum, Johari, Les

• Anjum wondered if PingER could detect anomalies related to the recent unrest (protests against the government and DOS attacks against universities (such as UM or UNIMAS) in Malaysia. there were several attacks from the Anonymous group between August 28-31st. Following the meeting Les put out a web page at: Malaysian unrest Aug-Sep 2015. Is there an update?

UFRJ

UUM

• Adib has  managed to resolve all issues blocking UUM pinger Measurement Agent (including, firewall settings, DNS, etc.) . It should be  stable from now on.
  from running smoothly including the problematic switch connecting our lab with the computer center, firewall setting,  DNS, ..etc. Therefore, we hope not to have any connectivity problem.
• Looking at the log and data at SLAC it looks to be working since 29th September.

Fatima  implemented her work (involving HDFS and MapReduce with Pinger Data) on 50MB to 200MB data sets, using a 2-node cluster, and then a 3-node cluster. The work is not completed, but she has obtained some good results and is putting together the presentation for her final viva. She and Ibrahim are using the same cloud/cluster at MYREN.

UM

Ibrahim has extracted the  PingER Zip manually. He is reconstructing 11Gb of data, heas 15GBytes of data there. He is trying to use SPAR to classify the data. He alsop was looking at RDF. the next step si to use MapReduce to organize and reduce the output of dataso can vizualize it. He will be using a teh same techniques he used for looking at 1996-2006 weather data. 

UNIMAS

UTM

Johari will contact Hanan to request someone to support PingER at UTM, now Saqib has left. Johari will try dean to get a replacement for Saqib. However the Dean is new so Johari wants to gather some information first.

 Saqib

Has a student  interested to work on Hadoop and pinger data. Les has sent him information on the SLAC Nebula cluster Cloudera/impala/HDFS Pinger Data warehouse dedveloped by Thiago and Co.

Further he has a few more MS students searching for their research topics. We can also utilize them in our pinger project. They are from software engineering, database and network background. 

MYREN

No update 8/12/2015, no Update 9/2/2015. 

perfsonar-unimas.myren.net.my is back up and running

We have been unable to gather data from pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my  since September 11th, 2015 pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my. It is pingable  however there is no response from http://pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?function=ping&target=www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu&options=-i%200.2

NUST

Following the last meeting, Anjum, Hassaan and Les met to discuss the way forward. 

• "Adnan currently is unable to find resources for handling the project. Similarly, there is no progress on hiring of a full time RA by NUST HQ. 
• However, I (Hassaan) checked from HEC about the proposal that I submitted last year. They have informed me that 2 reviewers have asked for revisions while they are waiting for the third review. I am very hopeful about it. If the proposal is accepted then we can easily have a full time RA for the project. I have plans to talk to Dr. Zaidi about hiring an RA on assuming that our proposal will be accepted by HEC. We can then get his salary deducted later from the HEC project. I shall update you very soon in this regard." 

• Hassaan is  waiting to hear from HEC about the comments on the proposal. 

• Moreover, he has asked a student to work on the project for the time being. His name is Mian Anas however he will need few weeks to understand the project. 

PingER at SLAC

• Thiago completed setting up the  PingER data SQL Impala warehouse running on a Nebula/Cloudera cluster using the Hadoop File System (HDFS). Unfortunately it is not currently accessible from outside SLAC. There have been several attempts to provide outside access, but no success yet, we need to engage the subject matter experts. Thiago is now a SLAC associate so he still has an account at SLAC. There was a cyber security alert on the version of java installed with Cloudera. Les has replaced the cloudera version of java which should fix the vulnerability. However the new version has not been tested.

• The Raspberry Pi at SLAC is still running smoothly since June 11th.

Working on the following hosts to be able to gather data 

Next Meeting

Nb daylight saving ends Nov 1 in US. Alos note the meeting has been moved forward by 30 mins to accomodate Johari's schedule.

Next meeting:  Wednesday Nov 4th 2015 7:30pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Nov 5th 2015  8:30am Pakistan time, Thursday Nov 5th 2015 11:30am  Malaysian time, Thursday Nov 5th  2015 01:30 am Rio Standard Time.  

Old Items

NUST/SEECS Pakistani PingER nodes status

Pink Background indicates host was bad last month, strike through says it is fixed, yellow is an new bad host.

Is it time to start paring down the list of PingER monitor hosts in Pakistan, starting with those that have been down for a while and despite your efforts they are not cooperating.  One might also look at the coverage by region in Pakistan and try and keep good coverage for all regions.

Traceroute at UTM 5/9/2015

The traceroute problem regarding maximum reachable hops ( i.e. 11 hopes ) may be since the Unix/Linux/OSX  traceroute uses UDP to send the requests. The first request is sent to a particular port (33434), with a ttl  to tell it how many hops to go to.  The ttl starts at 1 is incremented as it tries the next hop, also the port is incremented (up to 33465).  It looks like the first few UDP ports are enabled and then they are blocked. The Windows traceroute uses ICMP to send the probes so does not see the problem.

Linked Open Data

Cristiane reports (7/1/2015): "I am trying to automatize the triplification of PingER data on Kettle. For now, part of the transformation is made on Kettle and another is made by a Java code. Although this solution works for a data sample, is important to have the entire process on Kettle because it facilitates to understand, modify and control the triplification process."

Feb 2015

The plan is still the one seen before (see project proposal), experimenting those alternatives. Right now, they managed to triplify the data according to a new ontology that takes advantage of a combination of a current standard for multidimensional data (called data cube vocabulary) and a revised version of Renan's Moment ontology adaptation. With this we expect to have a better data organization than the previous solution.

They are now preparing a test plan (like a small benchmark) to be used on all alternatives so that we can compare the results accordingly. 

Aug 2014

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 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:

1. A task/process flow writing all java classes involved on all those batch jobs;
2. 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. 

Renan is using OWLIM as RDF Repository. He is using an evaluation version right now. Renan looked into the price for OWLIM (that excellent RDF Database Management System he told us about). It would cost 1200EUR minimum  (~ 1620 USD, according to Google's rate for today) for a one time eternal license. It seems too expensive. No wonder it is so good. Anyhow, he heard about a different free alternative. Just not sure how good it would be for our PingER data. He will try it out and evaluate. He will also get a new evaluation of the free OWLIM lite.  

He has also made some modifications on the ontology of the project (under supervision of his professor in Rio) hence he  will have to modify the code to load the data accordingly.

Maria and Renan are advancing in some approaches to deal with PingER data, making it easier to be analyzed and integrated. In particular they have been busy studying and evaluating alternatives, analyzing results from the latest benchmarks on NoSQL (including RDF and graph based storages) database management, distributed processing and mediated  solutions over relational databases, and also other experiments with multidimensional analyses on Linked Data.  The new students involved are now understanding better the scenario and they have been interacting with Renan regularly. 

Cristiane has studied the PinGER data and how to cast it into Linked Open Data form. The size of the PingER hourly data for 1998-Sep 2014 archived via FTP in text form amounts to ~ 5.12GB and this corresponds to 15.66*10^9 (billion) triples. Then using 5  triples for each measurement and using Turtle without compression gives us 685 Gbytes or an inflation factor of ~ 200. 

When Christiane made the estimation of PingER triples, she wrote two documents that explain the process but they were in Portuguese. She has written the new versions in English.

• Counting PingER Measurements: https://www.dropbox.com/s/35itp7v6yasy3rb/Counting%20PingER%20Measurements%20_EnglishVersion.docx?dl=0
• PingER LOD Triples: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4oj5jqupwbujja5/PingERLOD%20Triples%20_EnglishVersion.docx?dl=0

Christiane's report is at: Size Inflation of PingER Data for use in PingER LOD

UM

Moved here 3/4/2015:

Ibrahim has setup distributed hadoop clusters. He has 2TB of disk space. Les has provided information on getting a subset of PingER data by anonymous ftp via ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/users/cottrell.  It was put there last September. Information on how the data was put together is at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Archiving+PingER+data+by+tar+for+retrieval+by+anonymous+ftp. There is information on formatting etc at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/retrievedata.html and some on the dataflows at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+data+flow+at+SLAC. Renan at UFRJ has successfully used this data, he has also characterized the data in terms of bytes/metric per year etc.

Ibrahim has started downloading all zip files in the local machines. 6 weeks ago he downloaded 2 GB of Weather data to test his nodes cluster, he  wrote a simple Java program (Map, Reduce) to find the Average and it was working fine. 

Anjum reported that UM had experienced a TCP syn DOS attack prior to Mar 12th (when an IDS was put in place). It occurred mainly for several days before between the hours on noon- 2pm and 7-7 in the evening (Malaysia time). He suggested looking to see if PingER could spit the effect.  Ibrahim, Les and Anjum will look at. Les analyzed the data and sent it to Anjum

NUST

The following is from Samad 2/24/2015.

• buitms.seecs.edu.pk #We have to disable gathering data from this host because the person still don't want to continue with us as i have tried once again to convince him but the answer is same. Les has disabled from SLAC. 
• nukhimain.seecs.edu.pk # We were unable to gather data since 20th November, 2014 and now the Node is working fine and collecting data as well. 
• pinger.uettaxila.edu.pk #The node is working fine from last two weeks. 
• sau.seecs.edu.pk. #This Node is working fine now. 
• pingerjms.pern.edu.pk #This node is working now. 
• pinger.uet.edu.pk # this was also not working from so many days. and now its working fine and collecting data as well. 
• pinger.isra.edu.pk # This node is also working fine now.
• pingerlhr-pu.pern.edu.pk # This is also working fine now.
• pinger.kohat.edu.pk # Collecting data now.

• The IP of "pingerqta.pern.edu.pk" has been changed, Les has updated the databas at SLAC with the following

  DNS: pingerqta.pern.edu.pk 

  Old IP: 121.52.157.157 

  New IP: 121.52.157.148

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/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. 

1. 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. 
2. 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.

Ibrahim

Ibrahim Abaker  is planning to work on a topic initially entitled " leveraging pingER big data with a modified pingtable for event-correlation and clustering".  Ibrahim has a proposal, see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17162/leveraging+pingER+big+data+with+a+modified+pingtable+for+event-correlation+and+clustering.docx. Ibrahim reports 7/15/2014 "I have spent the last few months trying to understand the concept of big data storage and its retrieval as well as the traditional approach of storing RDF data. I have integrated a single hadoop cluster in our cloud. but for this project we need multiple clusters, which I have already discussed with Dr. Badrul and he will provide me with big storage for the experiment." No Update 8/20/2014.

"I have come up with initial proposed solution model. This model consists of several parts. The upper parts of the Figure below shows the data source, in which PingER data will be convert into RDF format. Then the data pre-processor will take care of converting RDF/XML into N-triples serialization formats using N-triples convertor module. This N-triple file of an RDF graph will be as an input and stores the triples in storage as a key value pair using MapReduce jobs"

Potential projects

See list of Projects