PingER phone meeting between HEPNRC & SLAC 7/28/99

Rough notes by Les Cottrell
Attendees: Les Cottrell, Warren Matthews - SLAC; Bill Lidinsky and Shiqui He- HEPNRC.
Comments in bold face italics are action items.

HEPNRC staffing

Bill reported that Michael Henderson has left HEPNRC to take up a post at Lucent. Bill is looking at the other people interviewed at the time they interviewed Michael, to see if there is a suitable candidate who is still available. They will need to get a new personnel requisition put through, and hope to start interviewing again next week.

CHEP99

There has beena call for papers for CHEP 2000. We briefly discussed presenting one or more papers as we have at the last few CHEPs. The deadline for abstracts is 15 October, 1999. Warren has put together a brief abstract:

How No Collisions Makes Better Physics: All you ever wanted to know 
about achieving your Wide-Area-Networking Goals.

Internet connectivity is critical infrastructure for modern HEP 
experiments, computing goals can only be achieved with reliable, 
fast connections between geographically separate regions.

In this talk we will discuss past and future performance, how the 
requirements of HEP can be met and how we will know. We will examine
several networks and review several monitoring projects.

We aim to detect the recipe for success.

Les also put together a rough outline:

Active End-to-end Internet Performance Measurements in HEP & Elsewhere: 
when no collisions makes better physics

Why we care
        Distance independent collaborations
Methodology, deployment
Validation
        thruput, http
Comparison with other Active IEPM projects
Results
        Long term thruput trends
        Comparisons between networks
        Importance of routing
        Monitoring of major HEP collaborations

We agreed to think about this in more detail and return to it at the next meeting (see below).

Presentation for Lepton Photon Conference 1999

The organizers of the Lepton Photon Conference '99, have asked Matthias Kassemman to make a 15 minute presentation on the SCIC activities. He wants some slides from the network monitoring people a week before the conference (9 Aug-99). Les put together a set of 5 transparencies about the monitoring and distributed it to the meeting attendees before the meeting.

Bill made the following suggestions:

Provide a written explanation for Matthias of the performance graph information, including where the formula comes from, it validity, what one deduces from the data etc.
the comparison of networks does not leap out at one from the plots included, maybe simply provide the highlights in a text transparency.

Les will update the transparencies and distribute to the SCIC network monitoring working group and to Matthias by the end of this week.

SAS

There was a long discussion on continued or extended use of SAS.

HEPNRC have the SAS database on a Unix platform, and have a devlopment license for NT. the development license includes support for Java. However, the development package has to run on the same platform as the database. Porting the data from Unix to NT is a big effort according to Shiqui. Warren needs to be able to access the SAS data base at HEPNRC froma remote client at say SLAC. Warren & his student Yvonne are working on a Java interface (using JDBC) to Oracle and a public domain SQL database. It would be good if one could plug SAS into this. To do this requires a SAS driver. SAS does have support for ODBC. Warren and Shiqui will follow up with SAS.

Next Meeting

There will be a phone meeting on Wednesday 18th August at 2:30pm PDT.

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