Quarterly Report for the Distributed Monitoring Framework (DMF) project, July 2004

Progress: May 2004 to July 2004

The focus of the DMF project for this quarter has been to continue work on nl-lite (NetLogger light), a smaller, simplier version of NetLogger that contains only the functionality that most project actually need. Another focus has been to improve the NetLogger documentation.

We wrote a paper on Grid troubleshooting for the Grid2004 conference.

With the GGF Network Measurements WG, we continued to lead work on providing a framework for interoperable querying, scheduling, and reporting of network measurements. This work builds upon the NM-WG's GGF draft recommendation, "A Hierarchy of Network Performance Characteristics for Grid Applications and Services", an abstract classification and description of the most important network measurements. The principal elements of the framework are two XML schemas: one to query and/or request a measurement (immediately or in the future), and the other to report the result. These schemas will be combined into a single Web Services request-response operation, thus providing a Web Services front-end to existing network monitoring systems. For this effort, we continue to be extremely active in the Global Grid Forum. We attended GGF-10 in Hawaii to continue these schema discussions.

We completed our implementation for a"continuous", i.e. streaming real-time, relational queries over NetLogger data streams, which promises to add powerful real-time filtering to NetLogger. This work was the Master's Thesis for our student, Vibha Virmani.

Brian gave an invited talk at an NSF-sponsored Monitoring Workshop in London.

We continue to collaborate with several groups, including NLANR, EU DataGrid, Globus, and the IEPM project at SLAC on the possible use of NetLogger to collect monitoring data for their projects.

We continue working with several groups to help add NetLogger instrumentation to their software.

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