perfSONAR (www.perfsonar.net) is a set of community-developed protocols and a widely-adopted infrastructure for multi-domain network performance monitoring, facilitating the ability to collect and share measurement data relevant to solve end-to-end network performance problems and to enable network-aware applications. The first perfSONAR workshop was successfully held 8-9 July 2010 in Arlington, VA. This project will organize and hold the Second perfSONAR workshop to be held February 20-21 2014 at at the NSF in Arlington VA, open to members of the perfSONAR community. The goal of the second workshop is to build upon the first workshop outcomes and capitalize on the inherent flexible multi-domain nature of the perfSONAR protocols and infrastructure. The intended focus is to cross-fertilize ideas from a variety of stakeholders that include: researchers, applications developers, network operators, network managers, and others with an interest in network research and performance measurement/monitoring.
The workshop goals include: 1. Identification of unimplemented techniques and network research focus areas with existing ideas that can help solve problems of R&E networks, as well as open research questions focused on solving real world end-to-end performance problems; 2. Identification of required perfSONAR infrastructure components for network operators, end users, network researchers, and virtual organizations, and any missing components; 3. Operational requirements, federation policies and best practices for ongoing and on-demand measurements end-to-end, cross-domain, and transoceanic links; and 4. Creating a larger perfSONAR community seeded by the workshop participants, including strategies for engaging new network researchers, new domain science researchers, new science communities, and new networks.
perfSONAR is a tool supporting multiple high-priority programs in multiple U.S. agencies. It is a key tool for network diagnostics for in the High Performance Computing community. As such enhancements to the perfSONAR framework have direct impacts on projects across a wide range of disciplines. The output of the workshop will be a report suitable for archival within the ACM Digital Library. The report will summarize the discussions and recommendations of participants in accordance with the aforementioned workshop goals, and could serve to inform and guide future community actions.
" on February 20-21, 2014 at the NSF in Arlington, VA. This workshop purpose was to build upon the momentum created in the first workshop that was successfully held 8-9 July 2010 in Arlington, VA with support from NSF and DOE. The timing and organization for the second perfSONAR workshop is significant because there are an increasing number of groups within NSF supported programs that are dealing with measurement, monitoring and troubleshooting of multi-domain issues. These groups are forming explicit measurement federations using perfSONAR to address a wide range of issues. In addition, the emergence and wide-adoption of new paradigms such as software-defined networking are taking shape to aid in traffic management needs of scientific communities and network operators. Consequently, there are new challenges that need to be addressed for extensible and programmable instrumentation, measurement data analysis, visualization and middleware security features in perfSONAR. The workshop built upon the potential to bring together diverse groups for delivering targeted short/long talks, sharing latest advances, and identifying gaps that exist in the community for solving end-to-end performance problems in an effective, scalable fashion. Salient findings from the workshop are as follows: The perfSONAR deployment numbers from the registration service, and community evidence, continue to show the overall value of the measurement tools/software for localized network operations and end-to-end performance assurance across network domains that join measurement federation efforts. There were many success stories discussed during the workshop breakout sessions that provided clear evidence of the relevance of perfSONAR for music, video QoE and data-intensive applications in scientific communities. Moreover, there were guest talks from several thought leaders in research and from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that went beyond current perfSONAR scope. They challenged the relevance of perfSONAR in light of new developments in network performance for broader use (e.g., for measuring network reliability or home-network performance), and even public policy guided by broadband network measurements at consumer sites.
