This session brings people together with a common interest in getting the best possible performance from their networks. You’ll hear a brief summary from last October’s end-to-end workshop, and a little more about our new end-to-end performance initiative.

1. End-to-End Performance
Share and Explore
Tim Chown

2. Introduction
» The aim of this ‘birds of a feather’ (BoF) session is to facilitate open
discussion on a variety of end-to-end network performance topics
› Follows up on the presentation session earlier today
› Identify common issues, and discuss potential solutions, or – perhaps –
further work / priorities for Jisc
» NB. If you are tweeting from this BoF, please respect ‘Chatham House’
rules
› i.e. relay comments, but not who made them
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3. Topics
» Topics that have been suggested include:
› Use of local site network engineering
› Appropriate tools for data transfer
› Network performance monitoring
› Knowledge sharing on system tuning
› Interacting with users, PERTs, …
› +....?
» General assumption that the network core is capable
› Problems *tend* to be at the ‘ends’
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4. Local site network engineering
» There has been some suggestion recently that sites should seek to
implement a ‘Science DMZ’ approach
› A ‘controlled firewall bypass’
– In principle it can be beneficial, but many issues involved
» Use of a site’s ‘resilient’ link for bulk data
» Internal use ofVLANs/MPLS for traffic segregation
» How extensive are such methods already?
› Useful to understand this
› (see informal questionnaire…)
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5. Appropriate tools for data transfer
» We can learn a lot from the tools being used by HPC communities, e.g.
GridPP’s FileTransfer Service (FTS)
› Can/should we create something ‘lightweight’ that can be distributed
to other communities?
– Would require some committed effort…
» Perception exists that too often researchers try scp or similar ‘simpler’
tools, get poor results, and give up
› Part of issue here is knowing where to turn for help
› And expectation management
» What tools are people using?
› Is there interest to do better here?
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6. Network performance monitoring
» When presented with reports of poor performance, it’s desirable to get
some level of telemetry on the problem
› Ideally as close to the application as possible
» Various possibilities, e.g.:
› Full scale perfSONAR
› ‘Small node’ perfSONAR (on LIVA X type system)
› Roll-your-own iperf, etc
› RIPE Atlas probes
› …
» What are people using now?
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7. Knowledge sharing on system tuning
» If we can eliminate as far as possible performance issues within the
network elements, then we can focus on end system tuning
› Can you get the desired performance locally between two systems?
» A good amount of guidance out there today
› See http://fasterdata.es.net/ in particular
› TCP parameter tuning, etc
» Various scales of problem
› Depends on the nature of the end system
» Are we involved in helping our own users with such tuning?
› If so, how well do we do?
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8. Interacting with users, PERTs
» One of the challenges in delivering end-to-end performance is getting
the user communities, local campus computing services, and the Janet
NOC working together effectively
› Are users reporting issues?
› Is the local computing service aware of sources of help?
» Some NRENs have an explicit PERT function
› eduPERT database:
http://services.geant.net/edupert/Pages/Home.aspx
» At the moment, the Janet NOC is implicitly the Janet PERT
› But we are also building expertise through the Janet e2e initiative
» Are we doing as well as we can here?
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9. Any other topics?
» Anything else to discuss?
» Jisc is planning a workshop on local site network engineering, probably
in London in June
› Presentations and discussion on current practices, and how we might
do appropriate network engineering to support future data intensive
research
› How does the ‘Science DMZ’ approach fit in this picture?
» Possible ESnet OIN workshop in Cambridge this summer
› See http://oinworkshop.com/ for nature of content
» Thank you for coming 
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10. jisc.ac.uk
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Tim Chown
Tim.chown@jisc.ac.uk