Attendees
Nara, Tan, Imran and Prof Khairuddin VC at Unimas and Les in the Bay Area. Bebo was unable to be present.
General
We rescheduled this meeting to 26th July (instead of 19th July) Pacific time. The main reason for this is since the UNIMAS Vice Chancellor, Prof Khairuddin would like to join the session and is only available on 27th July (Sarawak time). The meeting was by Skype at 11am in Sarawak as usual. We started the meeting using video so the VC and Les could visually introduce themselves.
The VC had mentioned that they can schedule a visit by the UNIMAS top management to Stanford sometime late this year or early next year, to establish a formalised linkage. Apart from that Nara suggests that UNIMAS will seek an internal grant for local travels to ePinger sites such as Bario.
Also, it would be useful to identify international conferences held around California where UNIMAS can submit a joint paper to. This could allow UNIMAS research team members to travel.
Discussions with VC
Unimas will invite Les to visit Unimas for the order of a week or more to coincide with the Unimas 20 year anniversary celebrations on December 12th, 2012. This will enable meeting with the VC, staff and students, looking at facilities, fleshing out how the program should go forward, possibly giving talks on PingER, network monitoring etc. Unimas will send Les a formal letter of invitation to aid with visa etc.
Unimas plan to have a workshop on Pinger when Les come in December. Unimas will invite participants from universities in West Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, (Brunei and Kalimantan could be added). The idea is to establish regional agreement for types of studies that can be undertaken, the sharing of data and exploration of future projects.
In the meantime it would help if Les could put together more detail on what the Unimas student or staff would be engaged in at SLAC etc.
Unimas are going to propose a project to install ePingER hosts in remote Sarawak communities such as Bario in the Kelabit highlands. Initially these would simply be PingER targets responding to pings. Later depending on bandwidth availabilty etc. they could also be turned into PingER monitoring hosts and a web site.
To assist in authorizing visits to SLAC Les will investigate whether there are conferences, meetings etc in the US that could be part of the trip. There is an Internet2 / ESnet Joint Techs meeting from the 13th-17th January 2013 in Hawaii. The focal areas are: Network Research and Emerging Technologies; Network Architecture and Operations; R&E Network Applications. there are also usually session on non US networks, for example at the last meeting at Stanford there was a talk on Challenges of Building an Affordable and Scalable Wireless Network at Universities in West Africa & KENET: Where we are , see http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012summer/20120718-Wanja-Njue.pdf and http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012summer/20120718-Togo-challenges%20building%20wifi%20networks.pdf. Les does not currently know of a particular relevant other conference/meeting especially one on the West Coast of the US or even better in the Bay Area.
The government of Sarawak is embarking on a huge project on renewable energy. This is a big issue in Sarawak partially due to the isolation of many places. They have lots pf water so hydro-electric power is very interesting. They are interested what SLAC or Stanford are doing in this area. This is not an area Les is directly associated with, Being funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE) SLAC is interested in Energy. There is basic research focused on how catalysts work, how does sunlight work in plants to sequester carbon and produce energy, looking at the challenge to transform our future energy supplies from fossil fuels to renewable energy while still enabling economic growth see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports19/slac-r-993.pdf. There is also work on the Stanford campus and DoE sites see for example http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/energyss/2010//Speakers.asp. Also we strive to expand the use of renewable energy within our facility and our activities by implementing renewable energy projects and by purchasing electricity from renewable energy sources.
The VC also expressed interest in setting up a meeting with the SLAC Director Persis Drell to share ideas. Les will follow up on this.
UNIMAS PingER host name
Imran has successfully assigned the DNS name pinger.unimas.my to the UNIMAS PingER monitor (49.50.236.98). Les has tested the ping and traceroute servers and the ping_data server and all work correctly. Les will update the meta data for this host in the PingER database (NODEDETAILS) and let Imran know so Imran can change the <SrcName> in pinger.xml at Unimas.
Extending UNIMAS PingER hosts monitoring
Cocerning extending the PingER monitor at UNIMAS to add remote hosts in Malaysia to the list of hosts monitored Johari has just joined the team and will be identifying hosts to ping in Malaysia, and then add them to pinger.xml. For how to add hosts to pinger.xml see: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/faq.html#extra.
They have remote sites in Kelabit Highlands in Barrio. There is a wireless network. the hosts are solar powered. They could install an ePinger host and ping from Unimas via the VSAT connection. Could be a month or two to set the host at Bario up. There are other telecenter sites that are similar. They could also put up hosts in these places. These telecenters include: Long Lamai, and Ba Kalalan.
It would also be interesting to extend the monitoring to other more centrally connected hosts in the cities of Malaysia. What about Mimos in West Malaysia (KL) or at Kota Kinabalu (University Malaysia Sabah), Swinburne in Kuching, Miri, Manipal university in KL.
The monitoring will provide an historical record of performance (round trip times, jitter, loss), reachability etc. Based on this a case study could be put together to identify problems in particular the reliability (e.g. MTBF, uptime, MTTF), how congested the connection is, identify problems and possibly identify the causes.
When a reasonable amount of data has been gathered then a case study could be be made of the connections to the remote sites, to identify and compare the performance.
Imran Had problems testing the pinger measurement agent at his house. Private IP address maybe the problem since they use NATs at Barrio and probably at Imran's home.
By the next meeting they plan to have made a lot of progress on extending pinger.xml to add a dozen or more hosts in Malaysia.
ePingER
See https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/ePingER+Project
There is also interest in ePingER, e.g. for other major sites in Malaysia and even the Kelabit highlands where its low power requirements and low cost together with the ability to host applications such as a web accessible PingER monitoring station, could be very advantageous to quantitatively study the network performance, and provide reports for decisions makers and funding agencies on how to improve the network.
Les provided information on the hardware to purchase. Looking at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/ePingER+Project it says:
The initial two machines were alix2d2 (see http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d2.htm) models purchased from PCEngines (see http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm) located in Switzerland. The cost is about $110/machine. The machines purchased each have 256MB RAM, on a 500MHZ AMD Geode CPU, with 128KB L2 cache, and a 4GB Flash memory. They have 2 USB and 2 Ethernet interfaces. there is more information at the PCEngines site.
An ePingER App for an Android or iOS might also be an interesting project.
Next meeting
Thursday 23rd August 8pm Pacific Daylight Time, Friday 24th August 11am.
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Funding for visits and students
From previous notes:
Students have a local superviser in Kuching. We start with a couple of graduate students interested in network monitoring.
- They learn about the PingER and other projects
- They work on assigned tasks working in Kuching
- We meet regularly (e.g. weekly) via phone (Skype) to review progress.
- Meeting includes Les at SLAC, any Kuching students at SLAC, students and supervisor in Kuching
- Daily emails, skype calls & instant messaging to keep in contact
- Tasks will involve programming (typically in perl) of network measurements, analysis and presentation (GUIs) of information
The best of the best graduate students are invited to SLAC for 1 year as an intern/visiting scientist
- Up to 2 students at a time
- They will work together with the SLAC team on projects such as PingEr, perfSONAR
- Depending on the student there may be opportunities for presentations, talks, and contributing to publications
They are funded by Kuching
If interested then fairly early on it would be good to have a face to face meeting in Kuching and/or SLAC to go over expectations, do some publicity, introductions etc.
- Les has sent some ideas for projects/tasks. A first cut is available.
Future
Are there resources and what for:
- Funding for students as time goes goes on as becomes clearer, then seek student & grants
- Funding for face to face start up visits. Spoken to vice chancellor, Skype call between SLAC ann VC at a later time. Schedule a meeting to discuss resources. Visit to SLAC Internal discussions
Consult higher education for funding
- Funding for extended (1 year) internships at SLAC
What kind of students – graduate, BS, MS, PhD …
What are student interests?
- Building network monitoring tools tools (measurement, analysis, GUIs)
- Analyzing data, producing case studies
- Research, writing papers
Identify students
Face to face visits and discussions
Selecting students as interns at SLAC for 1 year and funding
Communications:
- Computing requirements, accounts at SLAC
- Interim email lists and SMS txt messages
- Documentation respository (probably use the SLAC wiki)
- Follow on meetings would include identified students, progress reports etc.