PingER Project

1
PingER Project

• Arguably the worlds most extensive active
  end-to-end Internet Performance Project
• Digital Divide emphasis
• Partially funded by MoST, US State Department
• Last three years a joint development effort of
  SLAC NIIT
• Many NIIT students cut their teeth on it, many
  papers, presentations
• Results
• Highly successful
• Identified quantified rates of improvement for
  regions/countries
• How far behind, catching up, falling behind
• Many presentations to funding agencies,
  politicians, NRENs, recommendations
• Case studies identified fragility of e2e
  connections, last mile congestion problems,
  inefficient routing

2
PingER Methodology
gtping remhost
Uses ubiquitous ping
Remote Host (typically a server)
Internet
Monitoring host
10 ping request packets each 30 mins
Once a Day
Ping response packets
Data Repository _at_ SLAC
Measure Round Trip Time Loss
3
Architecture

• Monitor hosts send 21 pings each 30 mins to
  Remote Hosts and cache results
• Archive hosts gather data daily, save, analyze
  make results available publicly via web

4
PingER Deployment

• PingER project originally (1995) to measure
  network performance for US, Europe and Japanese
  HEP community
• Extended this century to measure Digital Divide
• Collaboration with ICTP Science Dissemination
  Unit http//sdu.ictp.it
• ICFA/SCIC http//icfa-scic.web.cern.ch/ICFA-SCIC/
  

• gt120 countries (99 worlds connected population)
• gt30 monitor sites in 14 countries

• Monitor 44 sites in S. Asia

5
Time Series results

• Divides into 2
• India, Maldives, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
• Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan
• Weekend vs. weekday indicates heavy congestion

6
Unreachability

• All pings of a set fail unreachable
• Shows fragility, distance independent
• Developed regions US, Canada, Europe, Oceania, E
  Asia lead
• Factor of 10 improvement in 8 years

• Africa, S. Asia followed by M East L. America
  worst off
• Africa NOT improving

SE Asia
L America
M East
C Asia
Oceania
S Asia
SE Europe
Russia
Developing Regions
Africa
E Asia
Developed Regions
US Canada
Europe
7
World thruput seen from US
Throughput 1460Bytes / (RTTsqrt(loss)) (Mathis
et al)
Behind Europe 6 Yrs Russia, Latin America
7 Yrs Mid-East, SE Asia 10 Yrs South
Asia 11 Yrs Cent. Asia 12 Yrs Africa
South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa are in
Danger of Falling Even Farther Behind
8
Conclusions

• Last mile problems, network fragility, poor
  routing
• Decreasing use of satellites, expensive, but
  still needed for many remote countries in Africa
  and C. Asia
• Africa 10 years behind and falling further
  behind, leads to information famine
• Africa big target of opportunity
• Growth in users 2000-2005 200, Africa 625
• Need more competitive pricing
• Fibre competition, government divest for access,
  low cost VSAT licenses
• Consortiums to aggregate get better pricing
  (/BW reduces with BW)
• Need better routing - IXPs
• Need training skills for optimal bandwidth
  management
• Internet performance correlates strongly with
  UNDP ITU development indices
• Increase coverage of monitoring to understand
  Internet performance

9
Application to PERN

• Place PingER monitoring node(s) inside PERN
• V. modest host, trivial install
• Add traceroute/landmark server for geolocation
• PERN configures to monitor to border routers /or
  to end hosts at sites (e.g. site web servers)
• Currently gathers data daily, analyze, present
  via SLAC/FNAL
• NIIT/SLAC plans to develop front end to
  analyze/visualize results on real time basis
  using cached data RRD/smokeping

10
perfSONAR Next Generation Network Monitoring

• Partnership of Internet2 (US), GEANT (EU), ESnet
  (US), RNP (Brazil)
• Plus in the US SLAC, U Delaware, GATech
• 13 EU related NREN deployments of perfSONAR

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Why is this hard?

• Internet very diverse, hard to find invariants,
  phone models do not work
• Constantly changing both short and long-term
• Changes are not smooth but usually in steps,
  findings may be out of date
• No central organization
• Scientific communities span multiple
  organizations in many countries
• Typical path requires crossing at least 5
  administrative domains (campus, regional,
  backbone, regional and campus)
• Domains are autonomous
• Measurement not high on vendors priorities
• ISPs concerned about privacy, competitive
  advantage, public embarrassment
• Diagnosis hard
• Convince ADs there is a problem and that they
  could/should help
• Need multiple pieces of information from multiple
  sources (ends, multiple middles), with no
  coordinating body
• Gets even harder for layer 2 networks

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New Proposal to Address

• Widespread demand for net info by
• Researchers to know how network is performing
• Advanced net apps such as Grids (e.g. place data)
• Net Ops staffs to diagnose problems
• Education
• Flexibility in extracting net performance data,
  needed since
• Network changes quickly, diagnostic data is
  moving target
• New tools, metrics and types of analysis are
  constantly developed
• Lack of effective ways to share performance data
  across domains

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perfSONAR Infrastructure

• Provide/Enable Measurement Points and Archives
• Provide Authentication/Authorization
• Provide registration, discovery distributed
  lookup services
• Provide open set of protocols reference
  implementation for cross-domain sharing of
  network measurements
• Common performance middleware
• Open Grid Forum NMWG extensible XML data
  representation
• All development is open source to encourage
  widespread development, deployment, ownership
  involvement
• Early framework prototypes deployed in Europe, N
  and S America (Brazil), also adopted by LHC

14
Next Steps

• Develop scalable, distributed, redundant
  Federated Lookup Service (like DNS)
• Integrate common, existing authentication
  management into perfSONAR
• Design and build the Resource Protector to
  implement policy
• Provide specific, useful example diagnostic
  services as high quality examples (e.g. for
  traceroute, ping, one-way delay, SNMP, Layer-2
  link services etc.)
• Provide a Topology service to provide layer-2 3
  interconnection information
• Promote perfSONAR to research community
• Students get reliable data from perfSONAR,
  request on demand measurements, provide new
  analyses
• Turn into hardened/production quality
  distributable code

15
Impact NRENs Customers

• RE relies on reliable networking.
• Debugging problems across domains extraordinarily
  difficult today, increased switched networks will
  make harder.
• PerfSONAR enables divide and conquer between end
  intermediate points
• provides easy access to relevant data enables on
  demand measurements
• reduces need to coordinate multi-domain admins
  (scientist gt local net admin gt Regional net admin
  Backbone admin gt ), telephone tag, explaining
• Reduces participants, hours, days, frustration
  etc

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Benefits Pakistan

• Better understanding of customer experience and
  needs
• utilization, use patterns, event detection,
  problem diagnosis, planning
• Development of better measurement tools,
  analysis, visualization
• Pakistan part of major international community of
  NRENs, a partnership of users and providers
• In Europe, U.S. and S. America
• Worldwide RE people demanding better services
• Pakistan research education access to data to
  analyze

17
Benefits Education

• NIIT/SLAC proven track record delivering results
• 6 students, all will return to Pakistan
• 3 at SLAC now
• 1 In Silicon valley start-up, 1 in Oxford, 1
  returned to NIIT to pursue PhD
• Students get exposure to National Lab and world
  leading researchers
• Courses at Stanford
• Hands on exposure to production high speed
  networks such as are planned for Pakistan

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One Big Challenge

• Elegant graphics are great to understand problems
  BUT
• Can be thousands of graphs to look at (many site
  pairs, many devices, many metrics)
• Need automated problem recognition AND diagnosis
• So developing tools to reliably detect
  significant, persistent changes in performance
• Initially using simple plateau algorithm to
  detect step changes
• Provide reliable alerts
• Automatically partially diagnose events
• Gather info from routers, monitors etc and
  eliminate less likely causes

19
What do we want from you

• Now
• Installation and administration of PingER
  monitoring host (s) inside PERN
• Installation admin of traceroute/landmark
  servers in major PERN PoP/cities
• Chairman HEC asked for proposal to HEC for
  perfSONAR, will embed PERN requirements in
  proposal
• PERN needs to partner with NIIT/SLAC
• Discuss Contributions from PERN
• Later
• Deployment of Measurement Points within PERN

20
Additional Slides
21
More information/Questions

• Acknowledgements
• Harvey Newman and ICFA/SCIC for a raison detre,
  ICTP for contacts and education on Africa, Mike
  Jensen for Africa information, NIIT/Pakistan for
  developing valuable tools, Maxim Grigoriev
  (FNAL), Warren Matthews (GATech) for ongoing code
  development for PingER, USAID MoST/Pakistan for
  development funding, SLAC for support for ongoing
  management/operations support of PingER
• PingER
• www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger,
  sdu.ictp.it/pinger/africa.html
• Human Development
• http//www.gapminder.org/
• Case Studies
• https//confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/
  Sub-SaharaCaseStudy
• http//sdu.ictp.it/lowbandwidth/program/case-studi
  es/index.html

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Costs compared to West

• Sites in many countries have bandwidthlt US
  residence
• 10 Meg is Here, www.lightreading.com/document.as
  p?doc_id104415

• Africa 5460/Mbps/m
• W Africa 8K/Mbps/m
• N Africa 520/Mbps/m
• Often cross-country cost dominates cf.
  international

1 yr of Internet access gt average annual income
of most Africans, Survey by Paul Budde
Communnications
23
UNDP Human Development Index (HDI)

• A long and healthy life, as measured by life
  expectancy at birth
• Knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate
  (with two-thirds weight) and the combined
  primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment
  ratio (with one-third weight)
• A decent standard of living, as measured by GDP
  per capita.

Africa
PingER - Strong Correlation - Non subjective -
Quicker / easier to update
24
Med. Africa vs HDI

• N. Africa has 10 times poorer performance than
  Europe
• Croatia has 13 times better performance than
  Albania
• Israel has 8 times better performance than rest
  of M East Med. Countries

• E. Africa poor, limited by satellite access
• W. Africa big differences, some (Senegal) can
  afford SAT3 fibre others use satellite
• Great diversity between within regions

25
Digital Access Index (DAI) Infrastructure
availability, Affordability of access, Education,
Quality of ICT, Internet usage
Europe, E Asia (except China), Oceania top
right Israel Singapore with top group Middle
East in middle, Iran poorest Africa bottom
left S. Asia split Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh
with Africa India, Pak, Sri Lanka better
Strong positive linear correlation,
C Asia
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DAI S. Asia
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Why does it matter Business

• G8 specifically pledged support for African
  higher education and research by Helping develop
  skilled professionals for Africa's private and
  public sectors, through supporting networks of
  excellence between African's and other countries'
  institutions of higher education and centres of
  excellence in science and technology
  institutions G8 specifically pledged support for
  African higher education and research by Helping
  develop skilled professionals for Africa's
  private and public sectors, through supporting
  networks of excellence between African's and
  other countries' institutions of higher education
  and centres of excellence in science and
  technology institutions

Prahalad and Hart

• Saturating western markets
• High growth IT markets BRIC
• NOT business as usual
• New business models
• Distinct needs
• Dearth of distribution channels

Karen Coppock RDVP, Stanford
28
Experimental Alerting

• Have false positives down to reasonable level
  (few per week), so sending alerts to developers
• Saved in database
• Links to traceroutes, event analysis, time-series

29
Normalized for Details

• Note step changes
• Africa v. poor
• S. Asia improving
• N. America, Europe, E Asia, Oceania lead