A new infrastructure for high throughput network and application performance measurement

Les Cottrell
Stanford University

The SLAC led IEPM-BW project is aimed at providing a simple, robust infrastructure for continuous measurement of high network and application performance. It relies on both active and passive measurements, and tries to optimize the active traffic inserted into the network. It uses multiple measurement tools ranging from ping, traceroute and
pipechar through iperf to various file copy/ftp applications and netflow. The project has been taking data since November 2001, and results will be presented concerning measurement duration, window sizes and number of parallel streams, cpu utilization, comparisons of various throughput measurements, forecasting, impacts of high throughput on others and possible ways to minimize. Besides analyzing the data and making reports publicly available via the web, the data is also being made available to researchers and applications developers for making validations between various metrics, improved forecasting, and new visualizations. The presentation will conclude with a disucssion of what are the proposed next steps, and a scenario of how the informtaion might be used with a high performance data grid application.

Presentation (PowerPoint File)

Back to Large-Scale Communication Networks: Topology, Routing, Traffic, and Control