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Project Progress Report: Guok-ESnet-June-2005-Report
Date: April 2005 - June 2005
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Project Title:	ESnet On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation
                System (OSCARS)
PI: Chin Guok
Co-PI: 
Institution: ESnet

Number: Graduate Students:  1
Number of PhD Students:  0
Number of PostDoc Fellows:  0
Project Website (if available): www.es.net/oscars

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Summary of report

- First Production use of OSCARS Circuit by FNAL.
- End User Beta Testing.
- Collaboration with Internet2's BRUW project.
- Goals for next quarter.

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Detailed Report

First Production use of OSCARS Circuit by FNAL.
---------------------------------------------------
In the first week of April 2005, the production LHC 10GE connection between
FNAL and CERN was disrupted due to a fishing boat severing CERN's link to
Chicago.  As a result of the cut link, the LHC Service Challenge data was
rerouted over FNAL's production OC12 (622mb/s) causing severe congestion.

As a temporary measure, a persistent OSCARS circuit carrying only LHC
traffic was configured between 32AoA (in New York) and Starlight (in
Chicago).  This caused the LHC traffic to traverse FNAL's non-production
connection at Starlight, offloading the production OC12.


End-User Beta Testing
-----------------------------------------------
In June 2005, end-user beta testing commenced.  Accounts for Les Cottrell
(SLAC), Sean Flanagan (GA), and Dantong Yu (BNL) were created to allow them
to use OSCARS to request end-to-end circuits.  To prevent the disruption of
production traffic flow over ESnet by inappropriate circuit reservations,
the follow precautions were taken:

1. Access-lists were created to accept only a select few hosts that could
access the OSCARS web page.
2. Every reservation, LSP setup, and LSP teardown generated an e-mail
notification that was reviewed by an ESnet network engineer.
3. Traffic statistics on LSPs were monitored to verify bandwidth
utilization and packet drops.

Both Les Cottrell and Sean Flanagan were able to successfully make
reservations on OSCARS for end-to-end circuits, and utilize them to
transfer data.

The reservations made by Les Cottrell tested data transfers between
iepm-resp.slac.stanford.edu and pcgiga.cern.ch.  Bandwidth reservations were
set conservatively at 1mb/s and 10mb/s.  The purpose of the tests was two
fold:

1. To interact with the OSCARS' web interface to schedule the reservations,
and observe the consequent automated setup and teardown of circuits by
OSCARS during the time period that had been specified by the user.
2. To observe the characteristics of data transfers over the reserved
circuits.  A detailed report of the observations can be seen at
http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/dwmi/oscars/.

Reservations made by Sean Flanagan were mainly between NERSC and GA.  The
purpose of the tests was to dynamically schedule circuits using OSCARS, and
to replicate the data transfers done in 1Q2005 (reference
http://www.es.net/oscars/documents/Guok-ESnet-March-2005-Report).  The
circuits used in the 1Q2005 tests were manually configured.

Due to web traffic being proxied by BNL, Dantong Yu was unable to access the
OSCARS web page.  A work-around in currently being investigated.


Collaboration with Internet2's BRUW project
------------------------------------------
In the second week of April 2005, ESnet hosted a 2-day working meeting with
Internet2's Bandwidth Reservation for User Work (BRUW) project.  A decision
to jointly develop code for OSCARS and BRUW was agreed upon. 

OSCARS has adopted BRUW's web-based user interface, but a substantial
portion of the back-end has been rewritten.  BRUW is considering using the
OSCARS PSS and potentially the BSS.  Joint development of the AAAS may be
complicated by different security requirements.

Dynamic setup of an inter-domain LSP circuit (between ESnet (OSCARS) and
Internet2 (BRUW)) is targeted for the SC05 time frame.  A motivation for
this would be to accommodate LHC T1-T2 data transfers.


Goals for next quarter
----------------------
- Determining the "burst-size-limit" for the circuits based on the
  reservation bandwidth.
- Coordinate a working session with Internet2's BRUW project to
  synchronize the code-base.
- Bug fixes that were found in end-user beta testing.

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