Quarterly Report for the Distributed Monitoring Framework (DMF) project, April 2003

Progress: January 2003 to April 2003

The focus of the DMF project for has been to lead efforts in the HEP and GGF communities to define requirements for a Grid monitoring system, to finish a prototype GMA implementation, to improve the performance and fault tolerance of NetLogger, and to design and implement a prototype monitoring event archive. More details on each of these topics follow.

The majority of the work this quarter has been on enhancing NetLogger to allow better integration with pyGMA. This includes designing and starting to implement a filtering mechanism, and working with Karlo Berket to design a GMA registry based on his peer-to-peer resource discovery service. In addition, the "read" side of the NetLogger library was improved to speed up development of higher-level services that use NetLogger as a transport (such as pyGMA). The new API allows a single call to set up a 'pipe' which handles many of the details of efficiently reading from multiple inputs and writing the data to multiple outputs.

Brian Tierney presented an invited paper at the First International Workshop on Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks titled Using NetLogger and Web100 for TCP Analysis.

Dan Gunter presented a paper at the Proceedings of The 8th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management titled  NetLogger: A Toolkit for Distributed System Tuning and Debugging

Brian Tierney accepted the position of the chair of the GGF Nominating Committee, which is responsible for selecting members of the GGF steering committee.

We met which members of the Globus project to help design MDS-3, the next OGSA-based monitoring and discovery service for Globus.

We continued to work with the DOE Science Grid and the Atlas Project to define a very early prototype Grid troubleshooting system to let us better understand the issues and requirements of Grid troubleshooting.

Brian Tierney gave a talk at the University of San Francisco titled "Introduction to Grids".

We continue to be extremely active in the Global Grid Forum. Brian and Dan attended GGF in Tokyo, where Brian co-led 2 Network Measurement working group sessions. Brian has been working on a new NMWG document to define a CIM profile for network measurement data. Dan Gunter will likely co-lead a BOF on a generalized Grid event notifications at the next GGF. This BOF will use as a starting point the Grid Monitoring Architecture, and attempt to define concrete protocols that will allow the GMA to be used as an OGSI messaging service.

Brian Tierney continued co-leading the "Glue Schema Work Group", which is tasked to define common schemas for inter operability between the EU physics grid projects (focusing on EDG and DataTag) and the US physics Grid projects (focusing in on PPDG, GriPhyN and iVDGL). The web page for this project is http://www.hicb.org/glue/glue-schema/schema.htm . This work is part of the Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment (GLUE) Phase I task (http://www.hicb.org/glue/GLUE-v0.04.doc ). The Glue Schema Group has been refining the schema for the Compute Entity (CE), and has been working on schema for representing network entities.

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 made NetLogger part of the Grid Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT).

We continue working with several groups to help add NetLogger instrumentation to their software. This quarter this includes Constantinos Dovorlis (GA Tech), IEPM (SLAC), EU DataGrid R-GMA, and Atlas Athena software.


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