perfSONAR Workshop: Call for Participation

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8-9 July 2010
Arlington VA
Submission deadline: April 30, 2010

First Workshop on the perfSONAR Network Measurement Infrastructure

Sponsored by:
National Coordination Office
Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program
Large Scale Networking Coordinating Group

National Science Foundation
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Department of Energy - Office of Science
Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research

perfSONAR is an extensible, standards-based network performance monitoring middleware infrastructure, that not only facilitates the ability to solve end-to-end performance problems on paths crossing several networks but also enables network-aware applications. This infrastructure supports performance data collection and exchange between multiple networks using well-known protocols and formats. perfSONAR was designed and developed through an international collaboration, by technologists within the research and education networking community. perfSONAR is based on schemas developed in an open standards body, the Open Grid Forum. More than 68 entities around the world, ranging from backbone networks to universities to government laboratories have deployed perfSONAR. perfSONAR makes it relatively easy to take an experimental measurement tool, incorporate it into perfSONAR, and publish and archive the results of the tool.

The goal of the workshop is to use perfSONAR as a focus to cross-fertilize ideas from the network research community and the needs of the research and education networks around the world, documenting open areas and best practices. Potential focus areas are detailed below. Researchers will benefit by presenting relevant research projects, hearing operational and engineering needs, and learning about the protocols and system as a distribution channel for research results. Operators and engineers will benefit through exposure to research results and by articulating engineering challenges and research needs, and learning how perfSONAR might meet some of your needs. Because perfSONAR is relatively easy to extend and deploy, discussions are expected to have impact on the future development of perfSONAR protocols as well as deployments.

The workshop will bring together researchers, applications developers, network operators, network managers, and others with an interest in network research and network performance monitoring and measurement. The result of the workshop is expected to be the creation of an ongoing community of interest coupled with a report summarizing the current community consensus on potential research focus areas, deployment strategies, open issues, and operational requirements.

Why might perfSONAR be useful to researchers?

• A data source for your research
• An infrastructure to try out new measurement tools and methodologies
• An infrastructure to try try out new analyses and visualizations that might be attractive to production networks
• A way to disseminate your measurements, so that they may be correlated with other measurements taken across the same network paths
• An infrastructure that allows researchers to focus on tool creation and data analysis aspects, and not worry about data collection, publication, or tool dissemination.

Why might perfSONAR be useful to network operators?

• As a set of tools to provide quality assurance metrics
• As a set of tools to help you debug your own performance problems
• As a set of tools that lets you consume data from both local and remote equipment (routers and switches)
• As a set of tools to help you debug your users performance problems when paths cross multiple networks

Why might perfSONAR be useful to application developers?

• As a set of tools to provide quality assurance for your own community of interest
• As a set of tools to help you debug performance problems
• As a data source for your application or application middleware

(Examples from each community can been seen HERE.)

The data currently available through perfSONAR includes:

• Link utilization and errors (often at relatively fine grain [i.e., under 1 minute])
• Traceroute beacons & looking glasses
• Active measurments and active measurement results
• Latency (one-way and round-trip)
• Loss (one-way and round-trip)
• Throughput
• NDT and NPAD servers (test hosts, last-mile links)

In addition, Internet2 makes available anonymized Netflow data, BGP and IGP data, syslog data from our routers, and an interactive router query.

Potential focus areas for Workshop side sessions include:

• Research use of perfSONAR
• Transitioning research tools and methodologies into the perfSONAR environment
• Exploring how perfSONAR addresses current research questions; data sources, data for validation
• Understanding how to do research (going forward) using the data collected via perfSONAR by obtaining statistically significant results and what tools are needed
• Expanding the data collection to include specific metrics
• Policies for sharing data
• Researcher interaction
• Exploring how researchers and perfSONAR developer community interact
• Exploring challenges to both operators and network managers that are currently insoluble without a research component (a new direction for information to flow and would allow research to address real-life problems)
• Expanding perfSONAR
• Publishing research-motivated measurements or research results using perfSONAR
• Using perfSONAR to publish additional information such as middleware logs (i.e. gridFTP) so you can exchange more information than just monitoring data
• Understanding the implications of 100 Gbps transport and links
• Specifying what areas related to perfSONAR where funding would be useful; what areas of concern are not being funded today
• Operational issues
• Exploring both intra- and inter-domain deployment challenges
• Exploring operational aspects of using perfSONAR (challenges vs. expectations); how you incorporate perfSONAR and why it is useful
• In particular, using perfSONAR’s end-to-end performance measurements and host diagnostic functions
• Using perfSONAR in dynamic circuit or hybrid packet-circuit environments
• Exploring ways to build community support, support of code base & development, support for research, and operational support
• Increasing international testing between and among European, American and Latin American measurement points

How To Participate

The workshop is open to all, but is limited to no more than 80 people, to be selected by an executive committee. If you are interested in attending, we would like you to send a few sentences or a paragraph (in plain text or PDF) describing your interest to: perfSONAR-workshop@internet2.edu by April 30, 2010. Please also indicate if any of the focus areas are particularly interesting; we will use the results to craft breakout sessions during the workshop.

For more information on perfSONAR, see psps.perfsonar.net/ (home of the Perl-based effort in the U.S., including links to use cases) and www.perfsonar.net/ (home of the international project). A tutorial given at the most recent APAN meeting is available off the materials page of the workshop web site.

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