Minutes of the MB-NG operational meeting Date: 23 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, R. Tasker, R. Hughes-Jones, S. Dallison 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. 23/05/03 M. Allenby is still trying to get a date when both C. Cooper and R. Tasker are available. M. Allenby will also ask C. Cooper if it is OK to disseminate his draft policy document to MB-NG. 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. 23/05/03 The Manchester GSP system was hacked. The software is being rebuilt. Before that it was running satisfactorily. 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. 23/05/03 Ongoing. The UCL's Garmin GPS device needs a power supply. 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. 23/05/03 Ongoing. 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. 23/05/05 We will wait until the network is fully in place. 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. 23/05/03 INFN are looking to employ someone to fill Valentina's role. 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. 23/05/03 Timescale for deployment of Globus 2 and GARA is given as one month. 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). 23/05/03 In the end-of-year report, with the correct settings, 800 Mbit/s disk-to-disk was achieved with the Apache web server. With the radio astronomy software, large packet loss was observed. The conclusion is that the way the application is written is critical to the performance. Equipment ========= Status of testbeb ================= 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. 23/05/03 The IOS we are running is experimental, but required to make QoS work. After contacting Cisco, we have been adviced to wait until the official realease of the official IOS 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. 23/05/03 The RAL-Reasding link is still in loopback. A date is being arranged for a Logical engineer to go to RAL to harvest memory on old OC-48 long-reach and transplant it to the new OC-48 long-reach. The attenuators are in place. The 7600s will be configured next week. 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 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 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. 23/05/03 Direct access to the core GSRs for MPLS should be possible. We do not know when yet. We have an example MPLS configuration from N. Carter which we are trying out. 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 -------- 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. 23/05/03 We will push Cisco on this issue. Manchester are retuning their loan 7200. 11/04/03 The OC-3 (OSR and GSR cards) are due to be returned on the 22nd May 2003. 23/05/03 The OC-3 equipment have been returned. Experiments ============ Task 8: QoS Experimental measurements -------- 13/12/02 ACTION: A schedule of tests should be drawn up (Generic test plan for verifying functionality on network). Ongoing. 14/02/03 This action is postponed until the March report is finished. It also depends on the available equipment. 23/05/03 Experiments should include TCP over QoS BARBAR (HEP application) Reality Grid (Non HEP application) 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. 23/05/03 UKERNA should write value added to them. Applications ============ 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. 23/05/03 Next meeting with Reality Grid on 28 May 2003. 23/05/03 R. Tasker has an outline plan on getting BARBAR data from RAL to Manchester through the MB-NG network. R. Tasker will arrange a meeting with Roger Barlow and R. Hughes-Jones. The aim is to get to start sending data by September 2003. AOB ===== Next meeting: 13 June 2003 (the 2nd and 4th Fridays of the month).