perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Matthew J Zekauskas <>]

Joon:

Can you say a bit more about what you are trying to understand?   Do you 
have a particular performance goal?  Going to a test point outside AWS 
will prove your infrastructure (which is definitely a good thing to 
do!), but it may say nothing about what you can practically get into (or 
out of ) AWS, since that depends on the AWS infrastructure (as you note).

Internet2 AL3S (R&E) has 80G in a 2 40G LAGs towards us-east-1 (Ashburn, 
also gives connectivity to the new Ohio region), and 20G toward 
us-west-2 (Seattle/Oregon).   The AL3S TR-CPS service has additional 
peering points.

pas-adhoc.seat.net.internet2.edu sits on the router that peers with 
us-west-2.   Internet2 itself doesn't have anything public currently 
in/around Ashburn, but there is a node we use internally at Ashburn that 
can likely be used for debugging if you contact the Internet2 NOC.  
ESnet has a node in DC which is not too far from Ashburn, but I'm not 
sure how it is topologically to you.  (wash-pt1.es.net). MAX may have 
some nodes too.

I did some iperf testing to some AWS instances about a year ago, and 
maxed out around 4-5G toward Ashburn using an m10xl image.  You did also 
need to perform typical TCP tuning on the image.

One other thing to watch for is that all Amazon peerings use MTU 1500 
(it's their restriction); however most R&E peerings are MTU 9000, and 
AWS uses MTU 9000 internally.   I have seen PMTUD blackholes causing 
really crappy performance in certain cases to R&E; so you may want to 
restrict the AWS test node to MTU 1500 for best performance.

--Matt (note, I'll be mostly sequestered Monday and Tuesday, so if you 
ask followup questions of me, I may not respond until after that...)

On 4/1/17 2:07 PM, Hyojoon Kim wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Does anyone if there is a good perfSONAR node in or close by to an 
> Amazon cloud service (AWS) spot (east, west, etc) so that we can 
> measure how much throughput we get to AWS instances from our campus 
> network?
>
> We tried creating an instance ourselves and installing perfSONAR, 
> which works. However, it seems to be bottlenecked by the AWS 
> instance's resource, not network connection.  (e.g., 
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18507405/ec2-instance-typess-exact-network-performance) 
>
>
> Thanks,
> Joon