First GÉANT2 Technical Workshop held in Cambridge
The first ever GÉANT2 technical workshop was
held in Cambridge on 9-13 January 2006. The week long event brought together network users and engineers from the project’s partners to participate in development workshops and cross-topic discussions. More than 180 participants from all over Europe attended the workshop.
“The aim of the event was to disseminate information and results amongst all project teams.” said Roberto Sabatino, GÉANT2’s Chief Technical Officer, “It is important that all project partners are aware of what is happening throughout the GÉANT2 project, and how the tools and services developed in each activity may benefit all the NRENs and their users.”
Plenary sessions held on Tuesday saw status updates from all the project’s research activities, as well as a network implementation report from Marian Garcia Vidondo, DANTE’s head of Operations. Marian reported that over a third of the network is now operational, including five of the dark fibre routes and 13 of the network’s 30 Points of Presence.
The plenary sessions were accompanied by a number of “Meet the NRENs” events, which allowed each activity leader to present their achievements and outline future developments to an NREN audience, with the aim of increasing uptake and rollout of these services. Toby Rodwell, who presented on behalf of the PACE activity (Performance and Allocated Capacity for End Users) said “One of the aims of our session was to bring the PERT (Performance Enhancement and Response Team) to a wider audience, and to increase uptake of the service among the NREN partners. The immediate response was positive, and we believe the coming months will see an increase in the number of cases reported to the PERT and an expansion of the PERT’s virtual team.”
The workshop also saw the unveiling of the Advance Multi-Domain Provisioning System (AMPS). The successor to GÉANT’s Premium IP Provisioning (PiP) service, it allows for regulation of prioritised IP traffic in multiple domains. For the first time, users will be able to book bandwidth in advance, at Premium IP quality, across multiple domains. A user only needs to know the network status in their own domain, as the AMPS system automatically passes the request along to neighbouring domains. This allows new networks to more easily join the service. The system has been developed by GRNET (Greece), PSNC (Poland), Renater (France) and DANTE. AMPS is already a production service in GÉANT2, and a pilot service will shortly be implemented by GRNET, PSNC, UKERNA (UK) and GARR (Italy). A full production service across multiple domains will be dependent on the uptake of the system by other NRENs.
The team behind AMPS have been liaising with counterparts in ESnet and Internet2 on deployment of the service, and transatlantic trials will begin sometime in February. Other future developments to the service include implementing a usage policy and integration with results from other research activities, such as Bandwidth Allocation and Reservation, and Roaming and Authorisation.
A PerfSONAR development week was held in parallel to the technical workshop. PerfSONAR is the monitoring tool developed jointly by GEANT2, Internet2 and ESnet, and for the first time, will enable an end-to-end view of network performance between interconnected networks. Until PerfSONAR was developed, there was little consistency in the presentation of monitoring data, requiring network managers to use different tools for each network they monitored.
The next GÉANT2 Technical Workshop will be held in June 2006.
Send us your photos!
If you attended the first Technical Workshop and have any photos please send them to prm@dante.org.uk
