The most remarkable trend of the Internet in the past decade has been an unsatisfied demand for ever-increasing bandwidth, specifically in the Internet backbone networks. A leading role is taken by the NSF-sponsored High-Performance Connection (HPC) community.
While sufficient bandwidth has been made available to match the growing demand, facilities to enable applications to utilize those networks have not. An important factor for performance tuning is the ability to passively monitor application behavior and deduce which of the many different components (host end systems, protocol stacks, access networks, backbone contention, routing behavior, etc.) is causing the slow down, preventing modern applications from reaching the expected gigabit-per-second transmission speeds. Examples include the design and implementation of the NSF Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) - the TeraGrid and the Pacific Light Rail initiative.
The goal of the OC192mon project is to rapidly prototype and deploy a passive monitoring system capable of capturing IP header traces with precision timestamping at a single OC192c/10GigabitEthernet network link. If successful, the system can be supplemented by a second card to enable bidirectional link monitoring, thus enabling advanced functions such as application performance and flow monitoring.
The Dag6 passive network measurement card is being developed by the University of Waikato (New Zealand) Dag research group in partnership with its newly formed spinoff Endace Measurement Systems Ltd. The card will support existing fast/wide PCI bus systems (64bit, 66MHz) as well as upcoming PCI-X technology. The OC192c framer supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet in addition to SONET/SDH.
The design of the board and the VHDL is being carried out in the first quarter of 2002, followed by functional and performance stress tests with existing OC192c test gear at the San Diego Super Computer Center and at Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL), who are also supporting the project. The mature prototype will then be deployed by the NLANR Measurement and Network Analysis Research Group to collect initial passive network header traces within the NSF NPACI DTF, the TeraGrid and the Pacific Light Rail network initiatives.
For more information, please contact Jöerg Micheel, NLANR Passive Measurement and Analysis (PMA) Project leader and Senior Research Officer, Computer Science Dept., University of Waikato: joerg(at)nlanr.net, or choose the feedback link above.