NLANR Network Performance Advisor Update

By Herbert Morgan, NCSA

In January, Jim Ferguson, manager of the NLANR Distributed Application Support Team (DAST), and Tanya Brethour, the project's lead designer, demonstrated the NLANR Network Performance Advisor at the Joint Techs Workshop in Hawaii.

At that stage of development, the Advisor successfully displayed data collected from the Internet2 End-to-End Performance Initiative Performance Environment (piPEs) project, another measurement project. The Internet2 piPEs project publishes their data using the Global Grid Forum Network Measurements Working Group's schema. The demonstration showed that the Advisor can read the schema and display the data from the piPEs project—in essence, speaking the same language. "They are publishing it in a particular schema," says Ferguson, "and the Advisor can read that."

Since that demonstration, DAST members have turned their attention to two of the Advisor's components—the Performance Data Historical Archiver (PDHA) and the Analysis Engine—making advances in both. The other components (the Performance Data Collector and Expert GUI) are very stable. The team hopes is to have a beta version in the hands of users by the end of August, which would give them most of the next fiscal year to retrieve comments, fix bugs, incorporate other features, and add more testing infrastructure data for use in the Analysis Engine.

The Advisor, written in Java, is designed to go on anybody's machine, connect with anyone else's machine, and provide a performance evaluation of that network, operating heterogeneously. According to Ferguson, it is not something that the user needs to set up and administer; he or she just downloads, unpacks, and loads it.

The user initiates the Advisor, unlike some available measurement frameworks, such as the Internet2's, which runs scheduled tests and publishes the results. The user gets a view of the network's performance from their end workstation or server immediately. The Advisor can also make use of archived data from previous initializations, as well as data from other measurement projects, such as Internet2's piPEs or NLANR/MNA's Active Measurement Project.

"We're dedicated," says Ferguson, "to helping non-expert end users of high-performance networks to be able to use their networks more efficiently." The Advisor is designed to do just that, by providing the user with a tool that analyzes the network and giving them a plain-text response on what they could do. If the problem appears to be out of the user's power to correct, they would get a file and be advised to send the file to their network engineer or administrator.

Collaborators are Internet2's End-to-End Initiative, NLANR/MNA, and the MONA Lisa Project.

The project members are Tanya Brethour, John Estabrook, Steven Ko, and Jianzhong Liu.

You can download available software and sign up for the Advisor Mailing list at http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Advisor/.