perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Joe Metzger <>]

Terrence,
While the perfSONAR tools & protocols are still under development, they
can provide significant value to you now.  We have been working  
extensively
with the US Atlas community, which has installed perfSONAR tools at  
almost
every US Atlas Tier 2. The Atlas administrators have been successfully  
using
it to find and resolve network bottlenecks, or to rule out the network  
as
the source of some file transfer problems.

A similar deployment effort is also underway at all the LHC Tier 1's  
around the world.

You will want to setup your perfSONAR system to regularly measure the
network paths between your system and the other CMS Tier 1's and Tier  
2's
that you collaborate with, or depend on for your mission.

I think it makes sense to try and get together a CMS group to
recommend basic configuration parameters & test frequencies, and to
provide a first level of support to the smaller CMS groups in the
US.  I will talk to Phil Demar & Maxim Grigoriev @ FERMI and see if
we can get something organized.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach to you?

--Joe




On Jul 13, 2009, at 2:11 PM, Terrence Martin wrote:

> So as requested in the LHC/USCMS I have perfsonar installed on our  
> cluster in a spare node. It is still not clear to me, what is the  
> value to me, as an administrator of a CMS T2 site of having this  
> service? I have looked through the web interfaces, and aside from  
> being fairly cryptic and offering several uninteresting tests  
> between my browser and the node I do not see much else.
>
> Since I do not really care about my browser on my desktop on the  
> 100Mbps building network and really care about my cluster and its  
> two 10Gbps uplinks (one to ESNet) how do I use these system to  
> improve the reliability and performance of my cluster? For example  
> does this node upload data on a constant basis to a central site?  
> Does it report information like CMS SAM? Does it run tests  
> periodically between it and other nodes to develop a map of the  
> current weather of the network? The Pinger service seems to be  
> capable of collecting some sort of network data, and I saw some  
> graphs when searching online, but aside from seeing UCSD-T2 in the  
> configuration it is not clear to me how to actually get anything out.
>
> For example, what URL(s) do I enter in the PingER GUI?
>
> Terrence

Joe Metzger