News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

ATEAM LAUNCHES WITH COMPLETION OF FIRST TEST CAMPAIGN
Labs Partner To Investigate Complex Networking Issues Within Internet2 
And Beyond

RALEIGH, NC (July 29, 2002)--The ATEAM (Advanced Test Engineering and
Measurement) lab consortium today announced the successful completion of 
the first of a series of test campaigns aimed at investigating complex 
networking issues by deploying an advanced measurement infrastructure 
across a wide area.

The ATEAM is a newly established consortium of advanced research 
networking test labs distributed across North America. Founding members 
are the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) Internet 
Engineering Lab, Centaur Lab at North Carolina State University, the 
Ohio Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC-Ohio), the CalNGI 
Network Performance Reference Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center 
(SDSC) and the network operations center at the Universidad Nacional 
Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). Spirent Communications is the founding 
corporate sponsor for ATEAM’s testing activities.

"These initial tests were meant to shake-out the equipment and prove we 
could efficiently and securely use the test sets," said John Moore, 
technical director for the Centaur Lab North Carolina State University.

"This work sets the stage for further investigations into next 
generation advanced networking topics such as IPv6 and high-speed 
multicast."

Each lab provides connectivity and test equipment that can be reserved 
and securely accessed by researchers interested in taking measurements 
and performing tests between sites. The consortium also can gather 
network performance metrics such as latency, throughput and packet loss 
as well as providing functional testing for new advanced networking 
technologies.

The first test campaign aimed to validate the ATEAM infrastructure and 
its capabilities. Using Spirent Communications’ SmartBits(R) System 
equipment at each location, the ATEAM labs ran tests to measure packet 
loss at varying data rates and packet sizes. In one test, data was sent 
coast-to-coast at 400 Megabits per second (Mbps) across Abilene, a 
high-speed Internet2 backbone. While the tests were intended only as a 
proof of concept, they managed to discover previously undetected and 
critical configuration issues on an ATM switch located on the route 
between BCIT and the Centaur Lab.

"This really shows the power of this type of testing — if we can 
discover problems as serious as this on a one-hour trial run, imagine 
what we will be able to do once the ATEAM system is fully deployed,"
said Eric Byres, research leader for the BCIT lab. "And the test 
equipment has performed flawlessly."

The geographic positioning of the labs provides a distinct advantage 
enabling testing within the Internet2 core and across international 
peering points between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Future 
expansion of the ATEAM membership is anticipated and will include labs 
from across the globe.

"Working with the other ATEAM lab members broadens our knowledge of 
network performance testing, which ultimately benefits 
Internet2-connected universities within the National Partnership for 
Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)," said Kevin Walsh, 
director of the CalNGI Network Performance Reference Lab at the San 
Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

Paul Schopis, senior network engineer at ITEC-Ohio agreed. "One of the 
more exciting aspects of the test consortium is its ability to 
contribute significantly to the Internet2 community's End-to-End 
Performance Initiative by giving us the ability to simulate application 
behaviors across the network from campus-to-campus."

About BCIT
The Internet Engineering Lab (IEL) is the first open & advanced Internet 
facility for applied R&D in networking technologies in Canada, and is a 
part of British Columbia's premier polytechnic institution BCIT. Focused 
on Internet (Layer 3) problems, the lab concentrates largely on the 
study of design and management of next-generation Internet networks. 
Among the lab's pursuits is also the study of issues surrounding routing 
policies in the Internet, particularly with the route registries and 
constraint-based and multicast routing. The IEL is one of the official 
testing labs for CANARIE, Canada's advanced Internet development 
organization that connects universities across Canada, and engenders 
collaborative efforts in the area of advanced Internets. 
http://www.tc.bcit.ca/gait/iel

About CalNGI
The CalNGI Network Performance Reference Lab (NPRL) is located in the 
California Next Generation Internet Application Development Center at 
the San Diego Supercomputer Center.  CalNGI was created by a partnership 
with CommercNet and the State of California, Technology, Trade & 
Commerce Agency.   The CalNGI NPRL serves CommerceNet awardees 
developing next generation technology and participates with other 
organizations involved in the development and deployment of next 
generation network technology.  For more information on the California, 
Technology, Trade & Commerce Agency, see 
http://commerce.ca.gov/state/ttca/ttca_homepage.jsp for more information 
on CalNGI, see http://www.calngi.org/; for more information on the San 
Diego Supercomputer Center, see http://www.sdsc.edu/.

About CENTAUR Lab at North Carolina State University
The Centaur Lab at NCSU serves as a focal point within North Carolina 
for collaborations between state and national research and education 
networking communities and their corporate networking partners. It is 
the home of the North Carolina Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center 
(NC-ITEC) one of two ITECs chartered by Internet2 as a national test 
lab. Centaur also provides testing and research services for the North 
Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI), a statewide GigaPOP. For more 
information, please see http://www.centaurlabs.com/ and 
http://www.nc-itec.org/

About ITEC-Ohio
ITEC-Ohio is a state of the art network laboratory located at OARnet, an 
Ohio Internet Service providing network services to education, research 
and government in Ohio. OARnet also serves as the Ohio Valley GigaPoP 
for Internet2, connecting nine state universities to Abilene. ITEC-Ohio 
is one of two national Internet2 Technology Evaluation Centers. As a 
regional center of advanced engineering within the Internet2 community 
with more than 40 academic, corporate and collaborative partners, the 
ITEC-Ohio laboratory supports research, testing and evaluation of new 
Internet technologies, as well as network curriculum at colleges and 
universities throughout the state and the region. ITEC-Ohio takes ideas 
from the laboratory, deploys them in large-scale test environments, 
evaluates them, and passes the results on to higher education, research 
communities, corporations and government agencies.
Media Contacts

Internet2 Contact:
Greg Wood
BUS: +1 202.331.5360
EMAIL: 


Spirent Contact:
Cathi Lane
BUS: +1 818.676.2364
DIR: +1 818.292.2229
EMAIL: 


BCIT Contact:
Amardeep Gill
BUS: +1 604.434.5734
EMAIL: 


CalNGI Contact:
Mike Gannis
BUS: +1 858.534.5000
EMAIL: 


Centaur Contact:
Yokima Cureton
EMAIL: 

BUS: +1 919.248.1907

ITEC-Ohio Contact:
Dan Downing
BUS: +1 614.728.8100 x 228
EMAIL: 


UNAM Contact:
Gabriela Medina Galindo
BUS: +52.55.56228526
EMAIL: 


For more information, please see our website: http://www.ateam.info/.




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