June 9, 2006

Meeting Notes

Attending

Micah Beck, Terry Moore, Paul Sheldon, Alan Tackett

REDDnet (and other) Wiki's...

Discussion of Wiki stuff... Terry will point www.logisticalnetworking.org to point to a LN wiki page which will point to other things such as the LoCI page, L-Store Wiki, REDDnet WIki, etc...

The REDDnet Wiki will have things such as meeting notes.

Ultra Science Net

Terry: joining UltraScience Net? Paul has to write a white paper to get this done. He will do this this weekend as homework.

Brazil Trip

Hunters recent presentation to RNP (in Portuguese) -- Interoperability, virtualization of storage access

He and Takeo Kafuji will mostly put agenda together. We should encourage them to put up a draft for us in the next couple of weeks, then revise. Most important thing to focus on was getting together with application groups who need LN technology to get their work done.

 -------- Original Message --------
 Subject: 	Re: vague areas
 Date: 	Wed, 31 May 2006 15:02:42 -0400
 From: 	Terry Moore <tmoore@cs.utk.edu>
 To: 	hunter@nevoanetworks.com
 CC: 	Paul Sheldon <paul.sheldon@vanderbilt.edu>, Alan Tackett <alan.tackett@vanderbilt.edu>, 
        Micah Beck <mbeck@cs.utk.edu>, Takeo Kofuji <kofuji@usp.br>
 References: 	<447DD867.7030708@nevoanetworks.com>
 
 Hunter,
   In general I think that what has to happen now, in order to answer your question effectively, is a 
 conference call (maybe a couple) where we (the US partners) talk with each other, and also with you, 
 about how we want to define our goals for the meeting in more concrete terms.  Ideally, we would have 
 the opportunity space mapped out before the trip, but it's also clear that we won't really know what 
 the opportunity space is until we hit the ground.  Finding that out is certainly part of the purpose 
 of the trip. But let me give you some thoughts (in-line below) anyway, cc'ing my colleagues for their 
 input in the process:
 
 Hunter Hagewood wrote:
 > Terry,
 >
 > I'm here with Takeo and we are trying to plan what should be included in ya'lls activities. Here are 
 > some ideas and we need your help determining which are more in-line with your objectives (which may 
 > still be vague):
 >
 > Type of relationships:
 >     institutional - try to set something up with USP (and Vandy? UT? Incubator of the Americas?)
 I don't think this would be too useful at this point. This kind of stuff happens in administrator space, 
 and I think we have to have activities of more substance going on order to make it worthwhile. Of course 
 we'd be happy to talk with higher-ups at USP, both to help you guys in any way we can and set the stage 
 for future institutional partnerships. But I think we're a ways out from institutional relationships at 
 this point.
 
 >     partnership - find brazilian groups who have funding or can apply for collaborative research funding 
 > to work with a US counter-part
 This seems like the most important thing to focus on. I think we (i.e. the technology provides, US and 
 Brazilian) want to get together with application groups (research, education, medicine, government) who need 
 LN technology to get their work done, especially where that work involves collaboration with application   
 partners here in the US. Of course the latter isn't required in order to have such a meeting work well for   
 the NVD. If we find such applications groups, then the questions about funding for the effort (both theirs 
 and ours) follow naturally. The LBA guy you connected with (http://www.lbaeco.org/lbaeco/data/data_dis.htm) 
 is a perfect example of this. Paul's colleague, Sergio Novaes, would be another.
      Of course we also need to be meeting with technology creators/developers, like Takeo and his group, to 
 talk about coordinating, combining, or otherwise leveraging R&D efforts.  There may be joint funding   
 opportunities here as well.  I do have a question about where the RNP fits into all this though. I always 
 think of them as the Brazilian equivalent of Internet2, but they're actually much more of a government agency 
 with real funding to hand out, aren't they? I guess their primary interest is in getting their network used 
 and making the NVD project a success. But please, correct me if I'm wrong.
 
 >     collaborative - find brazilian groups who just want to use (or maybe contribute to) the resources 
 > provided by REDDnet and the NVD in order to improve their operations some other category - that would be 
 > determined by your objectives
 >
 This could be helpful, but I'm inclined to think that, at this point, the driving factor would be the 
 applications/activities that we want to carry out. Once we have those things going, people will have a much
 more substantial reason to start participating, using our resources and bringing in their own.
 
 > thanks,
 > -- 
 > Hunter Hagewood (+)
 
 That's all I've got for right now.
 
 Cheers,
 Terry

UltraLight Status

they want applications, people to use it more. We (Vandy) are deploying a first generation of test harness on the network. In a week or so it will be general and agnostic to the underlying storage element. We will be able to contrast and compare technologies... dCache... etc.

We are also very close to having an SRM interface to L-Store. Uploads work now, but still working on downloads (issues are currently with SRM code, Berkeley part, LBNL is working on it). Also, we don't know that our server will work with SRM version 1 that Fermilab uses.

Press release once SRM L-Store interface works via Science Grid this week! Terry can't help until July 1, but that might be about the right time scale. Make sure to include info on UltraLight connection.

What about L-Store at ORNL?

Have Bobby give regular status reports on REDDnet at these phone meetings.

SC06

What should we present at SC06? Two phases according to Alan: the stuff that we are going to do on the floor (like last year) but using new test harness... needs hardware on the floor.

Bigger issues: bandwidth challenges? In collaboration with UltraLight?

We can be doing our own tests of wide area networking by hitting REDDnet hardware using hardware on the floor.

Terry: when you are doing a demonstration it is an act of communication. What are we trying to communication: what we have with L-Store and what you can do with Logistical Networking? What can we show them that communicates what we want to show? Who can we reach? The application community? the HEP community? Alan would like to do a CMS pile-up use case. Intel has a very similar use case that looks a lot like the CMS pile-up use case. What about a demo with Brazil? If the Peru thing is working? We had talked about a CMS analysis, of hooking up the "root" analysis application accessing data that was directly in L-Store instead of existing locally. Tier 1/2 to Tier 3 data transfers.

Need use case scenarios from potential users. Solicit them from people prior to SC06, and then we return to them our "solution" for them by showing them at SC06 - do it live for them there.

Workshop at Internet 2 Meeting?

leverage the fact that global community will be there. Spring Internet 2 meeting... Terry or Micah will try to go to the Dec meeting in Chicago, and they will try to find out about setting up our own workshop. Problem with Dec meeting is proximity to SC06, so spring is better? Spring Meeting is in Washington... April 23-25 in Arlington.

TV Archive

Talk to TV Archive folks. Rachel Gibbons of ACCRE will contact those folks. We need to move on this relatively soon. Paul will send her e-mail that it needs to get done very soon because Micah has laid the groundwork already.

This appears to be relatively low hanging fruit, need to get this done and get a press release about it.

 Subject: Vandy TV Archive and the LC
 From: Terry Moore <tmoore@cs.utk.edu>
 Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 13:34:49 -0400
 To: Paul Sheldon <paul.sheldon@vanderbilt.edu>, Alan Tackett <alan.tackett@vanderbilt.edu>
 CC: Micah Beck <mbeck@cs.utk.edu>
 
 Paul and Alan,
    When we were on our visit to the CFA in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, Alan mentioned that one good 
 target for your campus L-Store was the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Well it looks like an opportunity  
 has come up to engage with them in a way that would be beneficial to our work on many different fronts.
    Micah was in Washington last week for a meeting the Library of Congress had to discuss their plans for 
 storage infrastructure.  Representatives of some of the vendors were there, along with a few people 
 representing their research partners (e.g. Micah).  He met a guy with Information Technology Services at the 
 LC named Mike Handy, who happens to be working with the VTNA.  Apparently, the VTNA has been digitizing it 
 content to mpeg2 and tranferring it in .5TB chunks to the LC. 
 (http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding/reports/2004-02-February-report.html)   According to Mike, 
 they've heretofore been sending disks via FedEx.      But the LC recently got on Internet2 and they naturally 
 want to start transferring the VTNA content that way.  Obviously, we have the tools to help them do that 
 quite effectively.  Mike suggested that Micah contact Marshall Breeding at the VTNA.  With Mike's help, it 
 should be a pretty simple thing to set up a depot at the LC, and with ACCRE's depot infrastructure already in    
 place, we should be able to start helping them do their thing pretty quickly.
    The first step seemed to be to let you guys know about the situation so that you could get in contact with 
 Breeding.  Figuring out what the next step should be, if there is one, seems to require talking to him next.   
 It would be great on many different fronts to get this thing going, so let us know what we can do to help.  
 We can certainly help close the loop with the LC.
 Cheers,
 Terry

Next Meetings

June 23 at 10:30 EST / 9:30 Central time.

• Discuss Alan's List of stuff for SC06.
• Status Report on REDDnet Depot deployment from Bobby
• Status Report on Test Framework and Tests
• Discuss Brazil Agenda

Action Items

• Paul get white paper done

• Get draft Brazil agenda within next couple of weeks

• Press release on SRM L-Store once it works in Science Grid this week

• Check status of Fermilab REDDnet installation, moving stuff to ORNL with Bobby

• Have Bobby give regular status reports on REDDnet

• Alan should come up with a list of a few things we might do at SC06 for discussion at the next meeting in two weeks.

• Terry or Micah will follow up on getting a workshop at Spring Internet 2 meeting - talk to people about what is needed to get this set up

• Terry will send us a copy of the letter of intent for Library of Congress proposal.

• Paul send e-mail to Rachel Gibbons of ACCRE regarding contacting Vandy TV archive people.