DOE/MICS Mid-Year Project Report                                                                                        Date:  December 15, 2003

Project Title:  Net100
Project Type:  Base
PI:  Brian Tierney                      
Institution: LBNL

1. Executive Summary

The Net100 Collaboration (PSC, NCAR, UT, LBNL, and ORNL) is developing a model for network-aware operating systems using Web100 as the means for incorporating network information and its analysis into host operating systems to improve performance. To investigate how effective network-aware operating systems can be, we are using a three-phase approach.  First, we will use the network-aware, Web100-based operating system to tune a simple, bulk-transport application and demonstrate its use over high performance network links.  We will then extend this model to support more advanced and complex applications, moving from point-to-point optimization to optimizations for fully distributed environments.  Finally, as proof that a network-aware operating system can tune and optimize performance on behalf of applications, we will also develop application-internal tools (based on NetLogger) to monitor the efficiency of application support, and provide an external monitoring methodology to gauge the impact this system has on the rest of the network.

Significant Net100 accomplishments to date (all sites)

Publications:

new in the past 6 months:

previous:

 

2. Recent LBNL Accomplishments: (June 2003 - December 2003)

The main task of the past 6 months has been to organize a workshop called "Protocols for Long Distance Networks" (PFLDnet) with Les Cottrell, SLAC. I was also on the program committee for the Bandwidth Estimation Workshop. We also collected a great deal of web100 data at the Supercomputing Conference in Phoenix, and will analyze this soon. We worked with the GridFTP developers to discuss ways to improve network performance. We also worked with PSC to do testing with 9K MTUs, and began testing 10 GigE. We also attended the FAST Project Review at Caltech, and an Internet2 Network Monitoring Workshop.

NTAF progress:

Progress on the web interface to netarchd:

3. In the coming 6 months LBNL plans to:

The NTAF monitoring infrastructure is  now completely in place, with new data being archived daily. The main task for the next few months will be to analyze the data in the archive, and to look for correlation between TCP settings and throughput. We will also continue to monitor the infrastructure for robustness, and continue adding more tools to NTAF. We are also evaluating the network monitoring publication schema being defined by the GGF Network Measurement working group.

Specific tasks include:

 

4. Research Interactions

     We have ongoing interactions with:


5. Remarks

   Detailed information on progress for the LBNL portion of Net100 is maintained at
       http://www-didc.lbl.gov/net100/
   Detailed status is at:
      http://www-didc.lbl.gov/~jason/net100/
   The full project web page is
      http://www.net100.org