EU 'ACTIVE' NETWORK MONITORING

Whilst our current proposal stores all the information locally to describe network metrics to any other host, it is important that this information should be available for universal GIIS publication. As active measurements can be quite resource intensive and hence intrusive, it does not make sense to conduct node-to-node measurement of all nodes on the grid. As such, a sole GIIS should be elected at each clique. Hence, only one machine in each country should conduct tests to one other machine in each country.

This would not give exact metrics for end-to-end connections, but should however allow enough information to give indication on network performance from country to country or from town to town.

Performance on passive measurements, i.e. that performed by applications such as GridFTP, are currently under development by Sudharshan Vazhkudai. His work is currently not implemented in this proposal. It is hoped, however, that future implementations of our scheme will incorporate his work.

VIRTUAL ORGANISATION

It was recommended by Alex Martin, that instead of building another DIT for EU active network monitoring, we could in principle create the structure requested by WP07 for active measurements by implementing a 'virtual organisation' that contains referrals to the appropriate GRIS/GIIS machines on the GRID network.

As such, performance metrics which have already been conducted are simply referenced on this virtual organisation to the appropriate node of the DIT of the GIIS/GRIS servers.

The benefit of this method is that the locally stored information will remain as it is, with only the structure of this virtual organisation defining the active tests which are needed to be performed. Should the appropiate test parameters not exist on the local GRIS/GIIS, then the virtual organisation LDAP could interface with the LDAP backend to perform the tests to acquire the performance metrics sought.

The structure of this 'virtual organisation' is hoped to be in the form of a list of countries under a root dn. Each branch will then contain another list of countries which would represent network monitoring tests from the branch above to this branch. Underneath this level would then contain the results of the network performance metrics - possibly similar to that presented for locally stored attributes.

IMPLEMENTATION

This is currently work in progress.

Fri, 17 August, 2001 4:30