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Research Network Engineering:
Community kick-off meeting
Tim Chown (Jisc)
tim.chown@jisc.ac.uk
Online, 9 December 2022

2.
Agenda
Today’s material
•Introduction
•Janet Network – David Richardson, Jisc
•Lessons learned shifting real data from CERN to Lancaster –
Matt Doidge, Lancaster
•Jisc’s network performance test tools – Duncan Rand, Jisc
•Discussion!
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High level goals of the RNE community?
Broad principles
•“The broad aim of the RNE community is to discuss and share
best practices in research networking, bringing together those with
experience in the area with those who may be new to the subject,
along with engineers and performance specialists from Jisc”
•Learn from each other what works well and what doesn’t
•And in so doing raise the bar of what we can achieve
•Help Jisc understand what it can do to support the community
•e.g. providing test tools on the Janet backbone
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4.
Strawman text on the Jisc ‘get involved’ page
The page aims to give a flavour of the community
•Present and discuss examples of network engineering practices in support of
research
•Discuss the tools, software and concepts behind Science DMZ principles
•Arrange and report on data transfer tests in varying scenarios
•Explore new technical solutions
•Foster collaboration between communities, within Janet and internationally
•We can change / add text as we please
•https://www.jisc.ac.uk/get-involved/research-network-engineering-community-group
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Things we might do
Examples in practice
•Look at applicability of WLCG / GridPP tools to other communities
•Designing how to run ad-hoc data transfer tests
•Documenting examples of Science DMZ implementations
•Performing comparisons of data transfer tools, e.g. FDT vs GridFTP
•Testing the tuning of host systems – MTU, TCP-BBR, …
•Encouraging perfSONAR deployment, creating community meshes
•Exploring correlation of various monitoring tool outputs
•Looking at cloud scenarios
•Maybe a “Janet Data Mover Challenge”
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Existing resources and knowledge?
We’re not starting with a blank page
•Good experience from a number of science communities
•e.g., WLCG / GridPP, JASMIN/CEDA, etc
•Some great advice at ESnet’s https://fasterdata.es.net/
•A lot of material presented at previous Jisc events (and E2EPI)
•We could pull pointers together (somewhere to be determined)
•Jisc can also provide resource to glue the community activities
•e.g. work with members / sites to document good examples
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Over to our talks for today…
David, Matt and Duncan

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Discussion
Over to the (virtual) floor…
•First, a quick mentimeter
•Please go to www.menti.com and use code 7424 8834
•Then…
•Any other comments?
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9.
Thank you
•For general Jisc help contact your Jisc relationship manager
•https://www.jisc.ac.uk/contact/your-account-manager
•Or email help@jisc.ac.uk
•For network performance, email: netperf@jiscmail.ac.uk
•Or ping me at tim.chown@jisc.ac.uk
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