News Archive (2007)

For current news, check out the LatestNews section

SC'07 Bandwidth Challenge results

According to this press release from Indiana University,

— "A team led by Indiana University, with partners from the Technische Universitaet Dresden, Rochester Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, was awarded first place in an international competition for leading-edge, high-bandwidth computing applications. \[...\] Using the IU Data Capacitor, a system designed to store and manipulate massive data sets, the IU team achieved a peak transfer rate of 18.21 Gigabits/second out of a possible maximum of 20 Gigabits/second. This performance was nearly twice the peak rate of the nearest competitor. The IU team achieved an overall sustained rate of 16.2 Gigabits/second \(roughly equivalent to sending 170 CDs of data per minute\) using a transatlantic network path that included the Internet2, GÉANT, and DFN research networks."

(Hmm, CDs? I thought that these days, the canonical unit for expressing incredibly large amounts of data was the 160 Gigabyte iPod ... oh well :-)

Congratulations to the team!

– Main.SimonLeinen - 22 Nov 2007

Wireshark 0.99.7 to be released soon

According to this announcement, Wireshark 0.99.7 should be released by the end of November 2007. It fixes numerous security issues, moves the capture code out of the GUI so that Wireshark can be run without root privileges, and of course includes many new or improved protocol dissectors. For more information about the changes, see the Wireshark 0.99.7 Release Notes living document.

-- Main.SimonLeinen - 22 Nov 2007

PERT Training Workshop: Recorded Audio/Video streams available

The PERT Training workshop from 19-21 September 2007 was recorded by SWITCH's end-user team. See PertTraining2007 for pointers to the slides and audio/video streams.

– Main.SimonLeinen - 03 Oct 2007

PAM 2008 Call for Papers

The Passive & Active Measurement Conference (PAM 2008) will take place in Cleveland, Ohio on 29/30 April 2008. Contributions must be registered by 14 October, and submitted by 21 October 2007.

Successful PERT Training workshop

As announced earlier, SWITCH hosted a training event from 19-21 September. It was attended by about thirty engineers from National Research Networks, Campus IT/Networking divisions and other organizations, in three separate "streams". We will try to make the meeting materials and audio/video recordings available soon.

– Main.SimonLeinen - 24 Sep 2007

Another server move

There hasn't been a lot of activity here over the summer months, for which I apologize. We have been busy preparing the PERT Training Event (see below) - please check it out, it will be fun.

The Knowledge Base (TWiki server) was moved to a different (newer and faster) machine today, because the old one will be retired when we have to move to different racks at CERN, probably in September, i.e. soon. Hopefully everything continues to work as usual, only faster (it's a nice machine).

Prompted by an interesting post on the DCCP mailing list, I finally started to write some topics on interactive (real-time) applications. Please feel free to add to them or enter suggestions on what you would like improved.

– Main.SimonLeinen - 24 Aug 2007

PERT Training September 19-21: Registration open

The GN2 project is organizing a training event in September. The event will be hosted by SWITCH in Zurich. Preliminary information and a registration page can be found here: http://www.terena.org/activities/training/pert/

– Main.SimonLeinen - 10 Jul 2007

Internet² Spring 2007 Member Meeting

I haven't been to the Internet² meeting in late April, but started to browse through some of the presentations/Webcasts. Joe St. Sauver's talk about Capacity Planning and System and Network Security is certainly relevant to network performance. It mentions a new network tuning tool for Mac OS X, which will be documented here shortly.

Knowledge Base administrativia

Emergency server move

The server that has been hosting the PERT KB wiki since its inception has finally started to break down a week ago. We had to move the wiki to another server, which should be transparent to users (the new server is actually a faster machine). We also started the purchase process for getting a new server for the wiki and other tools that had traditionally been running on the same host (Looking Glass, NDT etc.). Looks like this will be a nice eight-core Intel box.

Making the PERT KB more popular and more useful

The PERT KB sees pretty stable usage, mostly from search engine referrals. Over the past few months, the KB was mentioned twice on networking fora, once on the NANOG mailing list and once on the OpenSolaris networking forum. Both these postings left clear traces in the access statistics, with significantly higher-than-usual accesses over a couple of days. So, if you find a nice occasion to mention the PERT KB - or a particular topic - please don't hesitate to do so. Please use URLs of the "canonical" form http://kb.pert.switch.ch/PERTKB/_TopicName_ when doing so.

It would also be great if you added links to the PERT KB - or specific topics - to Web pages that you or your organization maintains that are related to network performance. This will improve our ranking in search engines. And there is room for improvement; when you type "PERT Team" into Google, the first hit is the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team at the San Diego Sheriff's office. We don't even make it on the first page of search results!

In the same vein, if you have any ideas on how to improve the PERT KB - better organization, missing topics, anything really - you can either contact me via e-mail, or simply edit your suggestions into the Wiki at any suitable place. Someone will notice the changes and act upon them!

– Main.SimonLeinen - 15 May 2007

Materials from ICCRG and High-speed TCP meetings published

There were two other meetings around the PFLDnet meeting (see below), and the slides from these meetings were just put up on the Web:

• The IRTF ICCRG (Internet Congestion Control Research Group) meeting - slides,minutes
• A workshop on high-speed TCP modifications organized by Microsoft Research - slides

-- Main.SimonLeinen - 07 Mar 2007

PFLDnet 2007 fallout

Before Chris went to PFLDnet, I had him promise to add interesting stuff to the knowledge base when he's back... which he has now started to do. Check out the TcpHighSpeedVariants section, which has new sections about YeahTcp and TcpFusion, as well as an overdue one on CompoundTCP, which is in Microsoft Vista. Hopefully more topics will come soon, but don't let that stop you from proofreading those that exist...

-- Main.SimonLeinen - 26 Feb 2007

PFLDnet 2007, Web100 for Linux 2.6.20, Sun 10GE card

After a week of vacation, I found lots of exciting news.

• My colleague Chris is back from the PFLDnet workshop and brought the proceedings. From a first quick browse, this seemed to include lots of relevant stuff. I hope Chris and others will help me add pointers to the PERT KB...
• The Web100 patch has been updated for 2.6.20 already (presumably on John Heffner's flight back from PFLDnet :-). I built a new kernel and installed it on a test machine that Chris Rapier from PSC wants to use for work on his HPC SSHpatch
• Sun announced a new dual-port 10GE adapter with PCI Express 1.1 (x8) host interface. It seems to have interesting on-board demultiplexing logic including support for many parallel DMA channels. Probably very useful for a busy server with many (not necessary so fast...) CPUs. Maybe also useful for "Land-Speed Record" stuff because it also supports "bonding" of the two channels to a 20 Gb/s logical channel.

– Main.SimonLeinen - 20 Feb 2007

Linux kernel 2.6.20 is out

Past Sunday, the new Linux kernel release came out. There are a few improvements in the networking area, notably

• support for NetXen GE and 10GE adapters
• TCP congestion control choice for mere mortals, restricted by system-wide configuration
• SACK fixes
• Hardware TSO for IPv6 on Intel e1000 adapters
• Support for more Chelsio 10GE cards

You probably don't want to read the entire 47290-line ChangeLog, but there's a nice concise list of changes on the kernelnewbies.org wiki.

– Main.SimonLeinen - 06 Feb 2007

-- Main.SimonLeinen - 05 Mar 2008 (archived)