Minutes of the MB-NG operational meeting Date: 09 May 2003 Time: 10:30 am Location:UCL Pearson lab Tel: 020 7679 7029 Video-Conf details: Gatekeeper: 193.60.253.29 Port_no: 1719 Conference no: *301234 Present: F. Saka, A. Di Donato, M. Rio. N. Pezzi, J. Orellana, I. Bridge, P. Clarke Via Video-conf: M. Allenby Actions from 4th Collaboration meeting. ======================================= 4.9 28/02/03 Policies, classification and policing: A draft report has been written by M. Rio. Efforts should be made to meet once a week with S. Bhatti until this task is complete. 07/03/03 No progress. Saleem was ill this week. 21/03/03 A draft has been sent to UKERNA (M. Allenby). ACTION: M. Allenby will look at it with C. Cooper next week. and also ask for his availability for a meeting with UCL people. 11/04/03 The proposal is to write two documents. One on general requirements and another on specific implementations and configuration. The current document follows the GEANT EF class definition. ACTION: M. Rio to send a mail to the people concerned to propose a face-to-face meeting to discuss these issues. 09/05/03 Setting up face-to-face meeting ongoing. It should include R. Tasker, M. Allenby, M. Rio and C. Cooper. C. Cooper has produced a draft document for UKERNA's internal QoS program. This will be made available when it is finished. Gantt Chart: ============ Task 3: Traffic generation and measurement (equipment provision) -------- 08/11/02 ACTION: R. Hughes-Jones to arrange meetings to discuss options and what we loose if we do not have GPS. This is a low priority. ACTION: UCL to investigate access to UCL based GPS time server (Speak to Lewis Grantham or Piers O'Hanlon). ACTION: S. Dallison to investigate the availability of a time server at Manchester. 31/01/03 Possibility of using NTS servers synchronised by the Rugby clock. The resolution must be checked. 28/02/03 Manchester have a GPS system which they are investigating (works with Windows but not yet with Linux). http://www.ripe.net/ttm/Misc/ 21/03/03 Manchester's GPS system is working under Linux. The resolution has not been tested yet. 09/05/03 Work is ongoing on at Manchester on how to calibrate and make an accurate measurement of the resolution of the RIPE GPS system. An antenna has been place on the roof of the Physics and the system is receiving a strong signal compared to a weak one when the antenna was indoors. 11/04/03 I. Bridge suggested we look at the Garmin hand-held GPS Garmin: GPS 16 HVS (Part No. 010-00258-03) £134.98 incl. VAT http://www.garmin.com/manuals/gps16qsg.pdf http://www.garmin.com/manuals/66.pdf ACTION: We should buy a pair and test them. 09/05/03 One has been ordered to test at UCL. Task 9: Managed bandwidth service -------- 01/11/02 On hold until network is in place. 21/03/03 M. Allenby will talk to Chris Cooper on this. 11/04/03 Ongoing. M. Allenby will produce something will be produced by the end of May. Task 10: Plan extension of demonstrations to sites in Europe and US -------- 01/11/02 On hold until network is in place. 31/01/03 A talk on MB-NG and our use of the Spirent equipment should be given at the Internet 2 members meeting. 09/05/03 We should start planning now on extensions to Europe and US. Task 11: The deployment and integration of the Middleware and APIs (GARA) -------- 04/04/03 Valentina Capaccio has setup the mailing list for GARA. http://server11.infn.it/archive-gara/ 09/05/03 Now that Valentina has left, we must find out who will maintain the GARA mailing list. 21/03/03 UCL is working with INFN to setup and debugging the latest version of GARA. Setup of the mailing list is ongoing. 11/04/03 UCL is working with INFN to try to get GARA stable in the Globus 2.2 environment. There is no plan to move to Globus 3.0 09/05/03 No progress. Leon Goomans' group (University of Amsterdam) are looking at integrating GARA with AAA. Task 12: High throughput programme -------- 04/04/03 The GridFTP disk-to-disk results are 520 Mbit/s compared with memory-to-memory rate at 941 Mbit/s. Manchester are investigating to improve the disk-to-disk performance. 11/04/03 Ongoing. Read/write tests to disk show a rate of 800 Mbit/s. Investigation Web100 output shows the transfers with GridFTP achieves, but does not maintain line rate during tests. HTTP file transfer program achieves 500 Mbit/s and Apache web server achieves 700 Mbit/s (Disk-to-disk). 21/03/03 Intermittent burst of receive errors have been observed (using ifconfig) on the Manchester PCs interfaces. ACTION: S. Dallison will look at combinations of kernel, drivers and interrupt coalescence values to try and mitigate the problem. 04/04/03 Ongoing. Coalesce value of 64 gives better results. 11/04/03 Ongoing. The Intel Gigabit Ethernet card is going to be changed to see if it is the problem. 09/05/03 Now all PCs at Manchester are able to receive a maximum of 950 Mbit/s. The transmission rate of the Manchester PCs are slightly lower than the UCL PCs (940 cf 950 Mbit/s). Equipment ========= Status of testbeb ================= 11/04/03 The new GE-WAN and OC-48 POS enhanced line cards have been delivered to UCL and Manchester. At UCL, they have been installed. The loan OC-48 POS enhanced line card is being sent back to Cisco. The 3 old OC-48 POS line cards should be sent back to Logical once the RAL link is in place and tested. The memory upgrades in the old cards will be transfered to the OC-48 POS line card destined for RAL before being shipped from Logical. 09/05/03 At UCL, the new GE-WAN ports of the 7600 routers are not communicating. At Manchester they have managed to send traffic between a GE-WAN port and a GE Catalyst port. This may be due to the layer 2 auto-negotiation. N. Pezzi will check it this afternoon. 09/05/03 The currently ship date for the RAL enhanced long-reach OC-48 initially scheduled for 28th April then 15th June has been brought forward to 19th May 2003 thanks to M. Mckeown of Cisco. 21/03/03 An alternative plan should be made that does not depend on the timely arrival of the Cisco cards. E.g. Control plane or MPLS. Running MPLS in the core network should be discussed with J. Couzens. 07/03/03 ACTION: M. Allenby will talk to J. Couzens on setting up MPLS. INFN are in a position to run MPLS. 04/04/03 M. Allenby spoke to J. Couzens. He will speak further to find out how much notice needs to be given for the setup of MPLS. 21/03/03 No progress. MPLS configuration over the production network for conducting tests between UCL and INFN through CERN should be taken as a separate issue. 09/05/03 Setting up MPLS from UCL to INFN through CERN should be discussed with Ian Bridge. 09/05/03 MPLS: Dynamic may not be straight forward. Static may be feasible. Rina Samani is working on the rules for accessing the GSRs. She is currently on holiday. ACTION: Mike Allenby will talk Jeremy Sharp on this issue. ACTION: Ask Jonathan Couzens if he has example MPLS configurations. 09/05/03 Christina Vitoli (INFN) is producing a document on setting up MPLS. We will use this document to help us configure MPLS in MB-NG and also between UCL and CERN. 09/05/03 A meeting with the Cisco consultant Nick Carter took place on the 28/04/03. We will be meeting again on 14/05/03 to discuss the tests we want to perform at Bedfont Lakes and the configuration for the MB-NG network. Task 7: e2e Network equipment configuration -------- 07/03/03 Lighting up RAL link: The delivery date is 17th March 2003. The Engine 3 line card is at ULCC will be shipped to Reading and installed. 21/03/03 The fibre is being spliced this Sunday. The line card has been installed in the GSR. Reading end to the GSR should be up by Mid next week. 11/04/03 The long reach card is in place. The work on the link might be done today. The attenuation in each direction needs to be know in order to do the power budgets for attenuators. The link may be borderline for doing loop-back tests. 09/05/03 The work on the RAL link has been done. The power budgets have been measured and two attenuators shipped to Chris Seelig. The dark fibre is currently in loop-back mode. The boundary and edge boxes at RAL now need to be configured for out-of-band access via the RAL LAN. 21/03/03 Loan Equipment: Loan equipment to provide and OC3 (155 Mbit/s) connection between the ULCC GSR and the UCL OSR have been delivered. This will enable us to the QoS functionality of the GSR. Tests will start next week. 04/04/03 Tests with the OC3 line card have been performed. We are able to demonstrate QoS on the GSR. The results show near perfect performance for the OC3. 11/04/03 Returning Other loan equipment: Manchester can return their loan 7200. At UCL, we would like to keep the 7200 for work on the middleware and MPLS through the production network. 09/05/03 Harvey Lang of Cisco has forwarded this request to Mike Mckeown. 11/04/03 The OC-3 (OSR and GSR cards) are due to be returned on the 22nd May 2003. Experiments ============ Task 8: QoS Experimental measurements -------- 13/12/02 ACTION: A schedule of tests should be drawn up. Ongoing. 14/02/03 This action is postponed until the March report is finished. It also depends on the available equipment. Spirent would like us to test their QoS conformance test suite. We should look at it, but we should not spend too much time on it. Spirent would also like: Reports on our tests. A mention in publications and at network workshops. Any TCL scripts developed for tests. For MB-NG's use of Spirent equipment to be presented to Internet 2 Tests are being done on the GSR. Test on the 7600 will be started at the next week. 04/04/03 Report on standalone tests: In light of Cisco's comments, we will split the report into two. One covering the GSR and the other covering the OSR. We will also incorporate the OSR results with the enhanced OC-48 POS cards. 09/05/03 The report has been split. Booking Cisco's Bendfont lakes for standalone tests. This will be interesting after the completion of the project report. We need to discuss: - Equipment we require and confirmation of availability - Plan of test we need to carry out (We will only have two days). - Who will be going. 07/03/03 We have proposed 1st and 2nd May 2003. We are waiting for confirmation from Cisco. 21/03/03 This date has been confirmed. We need to write the test plan. 11/04/03 The test plan will be reviewed today. 09/05/03 The Bedfont Lakes tests have been moved. New dates to be confirmed. The test plan is currently being reviewed with Nick Carter. 04/04/03 Year 1 reports for QoS and high throughput are being written. Introduction [P. Clarke] Will be written once all documents are available. QoS [Andrea Di Donato] Standalone, e2e and summary documents High throughput and demos [R. Hughes-Jones + Yee-Ting Li] Outline has been sketched out. UDP back-to-back, TCP 24 hour test. Might include results on TCP sharing and different stacks. Informational documents [P. Clarke] Ongoing Policy [M. Rio] Done. Future-2nd year Middleware [J. Orellana] Will finish during the weekend. Editing together [P. Clarke] 09/05/03 Year 1 report done except for High throughput and editing together. 11/04/03 Reality Grid: Arrange to meet with Reality Grid people (Stephen Pickles and John Brooke cc Peter Coveney) before collaboration meeting about running Reality Grid on the MB-NG network. 09/05/03 The Reality Grid meeting will be held on 12/05/03 at 11am. AOB ===== Next meeting: 23 May 2003. We have moved back to meetings on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of the month.