Network Performance Workshop: Target Audience and Prerequisites

Modern science relies on high-performance wide-area networks connecting researchers and resources scattered around the globe.  This workshop focuses on helping scientists, system administrators, and network operators ensure that their local infrastructure supports these scientific demands.  Attendees will know to identify and resolve common problems that cause poor performance over today's networks.

Goal:
This workshop provides scientists, system administrators, and network operators with a standard set of tools that can help identify network performance problems.  Scientists will be able to use these tools to easily and effectively report problems impacting their work.  System administrators will be able to differentiate between host configuration and network infrastructure problems, allowing them to easily resolve the former problems.  Network operators will be able to interpret test results, improving communications with end-users and system administrators, and they will learn how to resolve LAN, MAN, and WAN performance problems.

A specific set of open-source tools (BWCTL, NDT, NPAD, OWAMP and perfSONAR - all packaged in the form of a bootable Linux CD named the pS Performance Toolkit) will be used during this workshop.  Attendees are encouraged to review the web pages for these tools to gain an understanding of their operation. We recommend that participants configure measurement hosts on their own network after the workshop.

Workshop Prerequisites:

• Participants should have their own laptop, with the following hardware and software available:
  • Wireless internet capability, note most facailities that host an NPW may not have wired internet access available
  • An SSH Client (e.g. Linux and Apple users can use OpenSSH, Windows users should consider PuTTY or other SSH implementations)
  • A web browser, any will do
  • A PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat

Workshop Outcomes:

• Participants will receive the most long-term benefit if they incorporate the methods and practices discussed/demoed in this workshop by installing the tools in their own campus network.  The initial step would be to dedicate a single server by booting off the pS Performance Toolkit Live-CD.  Once some basic utilization numbers are determined, additional servers, each one dedicated to an individual tool, can be configured and deployed.
• Latency measurement can not co-exist with throughput measurements. For this reason, we suggest running multiple hosts. This means each location will ideally have 2 hosts to run each of the tools.
• For each measurement point, participants should determine which tools they would like to install. We recommend installing all of the tools at every measurement point even if you need to install them on the same host and only make one of them active at a time for now.
• All of the tools are dependent upon the hosts having a good representation of time. Therefore, NTP is a requirement for all hosts. In particular this means:
  • Each host should have full access to the internet for NTP (port UDP 123 must be open for sending and receiving). Information on how to configure NTP in a sufficient way for the measurement tools will be one of the topics of the workshop.
  • It would be useful for each participant to find several (at least 4 or 5) stratum-1 NTP servers "close" to the measurement points. Ideally these servers will be reached by diverse network paths.