RNP > RNP na mídia > 2009

DOE engineers help pioneer multi-network traffic monitor

perfSONAR tackles tough issue of monitoring multi-network latency

GCN Online

10.02.2009

A consortium of academic and federal lab engineers are building a framework and an associated set of software tools that can monitor the how efficiently data moves across multiple networks, called Performance Service Oriented Network (perfSONAR).

Internet2 network engineer and perfSONAR co-developer Richard Carlson presented the framework at the Collaborative Expedition Workshop, held yesterday in Arlington, Va.

While many IT products are available to monitor, and analyze traffic patterns on a single network, not many tools exist for analyzing traffic that flows across multiple networks. Yet, most data traffic that federal researchers transverses multiple networks. "There is not one institution that owns the entire path," Carlson said. An implementation of perfSONAR could provide a uniform picture of how data moves across all the networks.

The work is timely. This year, the Energy Department labs will start to receive massive data sets from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. So the challenge of figuring out where traffic is slowing down on the network will only become more of an issue in the years to come.

Carlson noted that, today, federal researchers should be able to move data across multiple research networks at about 10 megabytes per second. Today, however, most data transfers travel an order of magnitude or lower than that.

A researcher who is interested in how quickly his or her dataset snakes its way through this maze of networks can find performance information today, but he has to know who to call, and which Web address to check, Carlson said. perfSONAR would allow them to pinpoint where the bottlenecks are. With perfSONAR, "you can find out what is going on in a path without any prior knowledge" of the network analysis resources, Carlson said.

perfSONAR allows a someone to gather the data from all the networks in a uniform way, allowing the individual to quickly pinpoint where the weak spot is.

In this setup, each network, or domain, would host a copy of the perfSONAR toolset on a server. The perfSONAR framework uses existing network monitoring protocols, such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to collect performance stats. An ideal setup would archive performance history, so a comparative analysis could be done. The software package would also include a set of Web services that would allow external users of the network, or others, to check the performance.

fonte: http://gcn.com/articles/2009/02/10/energy-perfsonar.aspx