EFDA Remote Participation

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EFDA Remote Participation A Cut and Paste Report
of the Remote Participation Users Group Meeting
Culham 29-30 Jan 2009
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Outline
Remote Participation what is intended ?
Who are the people involved in EFDA RP ?
Review of the tools in use at present for RP
Review of the questionnaire on EFDA RP
Conclusions and an outlook for the future
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Remote Participation Tools Not only Video
Conferencing
Remote Data Access/ Remote Computer
access Network Issues Teleconferencing Document
ation Sharing Support and Documentations Remote
Experiment Participation
Activities in the EFDA RP Working Group are
organized in these different areas.
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Remote Participation
Remote Participation Technology should enable
fusion staff to work and collaborate
irrespective of their physical location. More
specifically, it should enable Fusion
Scientists/Engineers
to participate virtually in meetings anywhere to
collaborate remotely as if they were in the same
office to participate remotely in experimental
programs as if they were in the experiments
control room to do so with ease on experiments
at different labs to collaborate in the design
of new experiments or improvements to existing
ones
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Organization and coordination of the EFDA RP
The EFDA RP activities are implemented by the
Remote Participation Task Coordinators (a Task
Agreement has been established under the new
EFDA, Garching). P Giese Association Euratom
HAS/ KFKI-RMKI, Budapest, Hungary R
Castro Association Euratom/CIEMAT para Fusión
Madrid, Spain In close collaboration with the
Remote Participation (nominated by
HRUs) Technical Contact Persons (RPTCP) Remote
Participation User Contact Person
(RPUCP) Network of the RPTCs 50
persons Collaboration on volunteer basis
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Working Methodology
RP Workshop (JET 2001, Budapest 2004, Riga 2006,
Padova 2008) Participats RPTCs, invited
speakers Objectives to review the existing
Remote Participation technologies to establish a
work and development program Status monitoring
at regular intervals Regular VC meetings
(VC-TIER) every two months Forum EFDA Wiki
Ad-hoc working groups if necessary (e.g. EFDA
federation) E-mail Chat - EFDA Messenger
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Status monitoring at regular intervals
At the request of the EFDA Leader a survey of the
Remote Participation facilities has been carried
out by the coordinators. EFDA Remote
Participation Facilities Survey (RPTC_0196) was
sent out to the RPTCs of the European Fusion
Associations.
This questionnaire was circulated by me with very
little feedback.
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Remote Data and Computer Access (RDA RCA)
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Remote Computer Access
Transport the Display The user accesses
remotely a Unix-Linux-Windows desktop , the
network is ( mainly ) used to export the display
picture and import mouse/keyboard
events SSH/X11 based access - Asdex Upgrade in
Germany A combination of Citrix to access to
Windows world able to jump to Unix world using
Exceed is widely and successfully used at JET
England. Transport the local network The local
network of the main experiment is exported to
remote stations by tunnelling in an encrypted
and secured protocol. VPN is the only protocol
allowed by CEA to access to its internal
network. Transport only data and commands The
user accesses the experiment via a local and
especially designed client interface which
communicates with a server of the
experiment. TJII in Spain uses such technique
associated with interesting light downloadable
client strategies avoiding the common drawbacks
of such solutions. IST works also in same
direction.
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Data Access and Sharing
Data (raw or processed) need to be remotely
readable, and to be in some (rare) case remotely
processed and stored back but access libraries
differ across the associations
Jetrda for Jet , TSlib for Tore-Supra , AUG
access lib for Asdex Upgrade, MDS for RFX Padova
etc. MDSPlus developed by RFX Padova became
the de-facto standard for RDA Most associations
have implemented it more or less deeply, the
minimum being an extra MDSPlus layer on the top
of local access libraries. IST has developed and
proposes a new platform and OS independent
standard access layer  SDAS . EFDA ITM Gateway
It is intended to be used by the ITM community
to store modeling data and to run certain
modeling codes. It will have 100 Tby storage and
16 worker nodes (128 CPU cores). It will also act
as a gateway to the new super computer at ENEA.
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The Internet/GEANT2 is the backbone of all
inter-lab collaboration.
The Internet however does not provide any quality
of service Packets are sent and then received,
delayed, lost, sent again (issue with VC).
Not a real time network. Network
monitoring required.
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Security Authentication and Authorization
How many passwords and how many times one needs
to authenticate himself ?
Far from being only a technical problem Who
will be authorized to do and to see what is also
political issues as most of the associations want
to be proprietary of their security
. Associations using SSH or VPN use its embedded
authentication system. Access to JET is highly
secured and uses SecureID authentication system
an authentication code rolling. A Single
sign-on system as PAPI offers to authenticate and
to give all the resources the user can pretend
to, in a single operation. The multiplication of
different authentication procedures which is a
hassle for the user and can lead to undesirable
side effects is a challenge.
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Point of Access for Providers of Information a
system for providing access control to restricted
information resources across the Internet. It
intends to keep authentication/authorization as
an issue local to the organization the user
belongs to, while leaving the information
providers full control over the resources they
offer.
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Teleconferencing
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Teleconferencing tools and scenarios

• Tools fusion-standard toolkits for
• Audio Video (Videoconference)
• Desktop sharing (Screen and Presentation Sharing)
  
• Instant messaging (Chat)
• Meeting Broadcast
• Recording/on-demand-replay
• Administration (meeting booking, directories)

Scenarios Point to point and multipoint office
based meetings Seminars/Lecture type meetings
also fully interactive Management level
meetings Remote Control Room Participation
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Meeting room videoconferencing
Most of the laboratories maintain one or more
teleconferencing equipped meeting rooms typically
smaller ones lt 15 seats and larger ones gt 15
seats H.323 standard equipments Tandberg,
Polycom, Lifesize
Personal (Desktop) teleconferencing
Stations are present in almost all laboratories.
The most used desktop equipments are Polycom,
ViaVideo, Tandberg PCWebcam PVX (cheap
solution) Xmeeting (Mac) H.323 solution for
Linux (Ekiga, GnomeMeeting) ISDN is available
for the fusion laboratories in Germany, the UK,
and at CIEMAT, ENEA Frascati, CEA/DRFC and
Slovenia
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(No Transcript)
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Multipoint Conferencing
DFN Codian MCU Is a pool of tree Codian 4520
equipments, each of them has 40 ports 2 ports
for H.323 videoconferencing 1 port for H.329
data transfer NIIF/Hungarnet Polycom MCU
backup ITERs MCU will be installed Firewall
Gatekeeper IPP/RZG GK for the EFDA labs, KFKI,
NIIF, RedIRIS, JET, RFX, IFP-CNR,
ITER Phonebook The DFN facilities are and will
stay open to all scientific partners of IPP,
namely all EFDA Associates Contact Ulrich
Schwenn, Frank Hinterland (IPP-Garching)
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EFDATV IPP Garching It is a very powerful
structure for organizing meetings Avoids
firewall and connection problems Simplifies
management and organisation Establishes a
regular (previously tested) procedure to organize
meetings independent of associations
restrictions and connection filters Problem for
sharing special applications content (for example
Catia designs) but not well integrated.

• Very good experience with CIEMAT VPN service and
  additionally many visualization and analysis
  tools can be run on remote
• A single sign on mechanism (PAPI) improves
  usability and simplifies management of services
  and tools
• Problems
• Many retyping passwords accessing JET
• Users travelling to other organizations (usually
  JET) are not allowed to connect to their home
  sites using VPN

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F4E Agency , Barcelona, Spain

• Javier Cáceres

• Current status
• All stations have Skype and H.323 compliant
  software installed (Polycom)
• All stations, by means of Polycom, can make use
  of shared desktops and file sharing within a
  video conference.
• Users are registered with a H.323 id and E.164
  number
• Multiple meeting rooms with Lifesize or Tandberg
  video conference equipment.
• Mid-term time 2-3 months (should be ready by now)
• we will install our new Tandberg MCU
• we are currently evaluating IM solutions like
  jabber and in general XMPP based tools
• we already started the evaluation of MOCS from
  Microsoft
• we need to deploy our own screensharing solution
  even though lifesize and Tandberg allows some
  screensharing over one video channel.

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Desktop Sharing
VNC viewer is the de-facto standard and routinely
used for
one-to-one discussion meetings slide
presentations in tele-meetings (EFDA
TV) control-room screen broadcast (JET) (slow)
web-cam broadcast or engineering design work
Other softwares offer similar capabilities
integrated in the VC (Polycomm PVX).
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VC and Telepresence
a videoconferencing experience that creates
the illusion that the remote participants are in
the same room with you (A.Davis, Wainhouse
Research)
Pro Best Available Video Audio Quality, Room
Optimization, Reliable, Simple Handling
even by CEOs, Eye Contact, Life Size
Pictures Contra Highly Proprietory, very
Expensive, not Everyones Taste,
Incompatible with ITU Standards,
H.239 Multipoint Destroy Illusion
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Polycom
Other Telepresence Devices
RPX 400 TPX 4
TPX 204M
TPX 306M
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PVX and CMA (Converged Management Application)
but not simple to set up (registration at a
Gatekeeper) and problems most of the times with
firewalls.
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EVO (former VRVS) not supported at JET
Enabling Virtual Organizations System
LHC and other major High Energy Physics programs
free, no cost, but not entirely bug free
similar tools such as whiteboard, VC, desktop
sharing, chat
2 rooms reserved one for ITER and one for EFDA
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What about Skype ?
Easy, simple, widespread, multiplatform, free
Bandwidth issues
Safety issues
Not allowed at JET
Mostly point-to-point, rather than
point-to-multipoint
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ITER
Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a commercial
subscription-based web-conferencing service
operated by Microsoft. Free download from the
Microsoft website or as web-based (Java) live
meeting. Live Meeting includes software that
is installed on client PCs, and uses a central
server for all clients to connect to. Office
Communications Server Currently, those servers
are under the control of Microsoft, however,
Microsoft also produces which is an enterprise
conferencing server product. One of this server
will be made available for ITER.
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Teleconferencing - VC - TIER
Regular Videoconference Meetings on Topic of
Interest to EFDA RP were held normally with up to
15 participants using the H.323 based
videoconference. The meetings have been recorded
and put into the video on demand archive for
replay by restricted user (http//vod.niif.hu) Th
e minutes and the presentations slides are
available on the EFDA RP Wiki site in the RPTC
document store https//132.168.209.7/xwiki/ backup
on JET computer system as well
J\RP\Shared\RPTC-documents\RPTC-documents-reworke
d
Recording of VC ?

• Joint effort of KFKI-RMKI and NIIF/Hungarn,
  Recording by Codian IP VCR 220

The Legal question is not uniform in different
countries.
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Decided in Riga 2006 N 1 - 27/09/2006 N 2 -
08/11/2006 N 3 - 17/01/2007 N 4 -
14/03/2007 N 5 - 09/05/2007  N 6 -
27/06/2007  N 8 - 07/11/2007 N 9  -
12/12/2007 N 10  - 06/02/2008 N 11  -
16/04/2008 N 12  - 10/12/2008 Typically 90
min 15-20 participants DFNVC MCUs NIIF Recording
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IPP RZG Statistics for 2008
12000 h Total Connect Time (7152 h in 2007),
30 plus 12000 Calls (11500 in 2007) 350
Registered Systems at Gatekeeper, 40
plus gt 50 Conferences with Presentations
Sharing (mostly H.239) gt 40 Of all
IPP/RZG Conferences are Multipoint 4800 h in
2500 Connections to MCUs Starting at IPP 7900
h in 12100 Connections to MCUs Involving
External Partners from EFDA, CRPP, JET,
ITER, DEISA, 150 DEISA Conferences
6-12 Participants usually 1h 12.000
Room-Bookings (IPP) Codian MCUs (DFNVC)
Extremely Reliable (HD)
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Remote Experiment Participation
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• There are different users profiles and different
  levels of participation, for example
• Passive public view on events of the experiment
  for promotion
• Passive technical view to follow the experiment
  from his office
• Semi active technical view to look after a
  diagnostic or a device
• Active physicist participation to the experiment
• Active control of the experiment by a
  responsible officer (pilot).

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Remote Experiment Participation in EFDA
Yes
Some of the desired REP services are provided but
with many different standards.
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Remote Participation Survey Results

• 53 responses
• 5 groups
• Teleconferencing
• Teleconferencing Services
• Remote Access
• Online Remote Experimentation
• Shared Services
• 4 issues
• Necessity
• Usage
• Facilities
• Quality

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Teleconferencing
Difficult teleconferencing from outside
labs Problems with Linux/MAC Bad quality
facilities (because cheap?) Chairman for muting
microphones Dsk VC manual
Very high necessity Generalized use Daily -gt
10 Weekly -gt 25 Monthly -gt 45 Never -gt
10 Similar use of VC rooms and desktop Not
enough facilities Rooms VC -gt 46 Desk. VC -gt
42 Good quality VC rooms 80 (20 very
good) VC Desk 66 (4 very good)
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Remote Access
Very high necessity High use rate Good facilities
(better for Remote Computer Access) Good quality
A step backward with new Citrix client
Remote Experimentation
High necessity Not currently used Unknown
facilities and services (very high level of not
answers in facilities and quality questions)
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Shared Services
Topics Shared calendars and agendas Shared files
repository Shared project management Shared
document repository Very high necessity (about
90) Not currently used services Not enough
facilities at all (about 70)
Really poor and needs serious updating. It is
the remote bit that is missing. EFDA IDM to
share documents and this is ok but 'hard work'.
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Recommendations and Conclusions
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Recommendations for VC

• H.323 Still on top, SIP slowly following
  (hidden in UC)
• H.239 / EFDA-TV Do we need 2 protocols, 2
  connections accepted?
• Audio Good microphony possible,
  reproducibility of setup
• Echocancellation AEC, AGC
• Testsites for checking Audio levels (MCU!)?
• SW-Systems PVX still top, avoid all
  open-source, CMA after 2009
• HW-Systems LifeSize, Polycom, Tandberg move
  to 1080P
• Room Control AMX, Crestron necessary for all
  scenarios
• Networks NRENs, GEANT2, Internet 2 perfect,
  
• LANs to be improved
• Statistics IPP, Booking, Phonebook
  collection
• MCUs ITER, F4E, DFN, Niifs, MCUs for EFDA
• Streaming, Recording, gateway to MOCS etc.
• - Rule of thumb Acceptance x T x M x O

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• The main RP tools are already extensively used
• Teleconferencing
• To achieve an adequate quality of conferences it
  is recommended within the EFDA community for
  remote meetings the use of H.323 based equipment
  together with EFDATV.
• Good quality of sound is mandatory
• The DFN facilities are and will stay open to all
  scientific partners of IPP, namely all EFDA
  Associates.
• The improvement of the EFDATV is essential .
• The EFDA Phonebook collection set up at EFDA CSU
• Meeting recording and on-demand replay should
  become an EFDA-wide service.

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Use of certificates for authentication and
authorization is obviously the most efficient and
flexible way. Ideally a user will authenticate
one time and will benefit of all authorizations
depending on his profile, for defined
duration A federation enabling collaboration of
European sites should be consolidated and
involve more fusion sites Remote Experiment
Participation is a basic element for the
users Although Remote experiment is still rarely
implemented, some modules of it are well
established and stable. Tools should be developed
on the base of the users need. It is necessary
to practice effectively REP to get realistic
experience regardless of the level and the
technical means The re-establishment of the
Remote Participation Users Group Does it exist
real users interest?