October 2007 - nml-wg - lists.ogf.org

Coming up: meeting in Seattle.
by Paola Grosso 22 Feb '08

22 Feb '08

Hi NML-ers During OGF21 in Seattle we will have two sessions for the NML-WG: Mon. Oct.15 11am-12.30pm Tue. Oct.16 11am-12.30pm Starting point of discussion is our document providing the context for work. We are still looking at contribution to this document. It is far from complete. Please, have a look. (The document is available on the project web site on GridForge and it was sent to the mailing list earlier this summer) If you plan to present get in contact with the wg chairs. Regards, Paola and Martin

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CFP: PFLDNET2008 Protocols for very long distance high speed networks
by Pascale VICAT-BLANC 19 Oct '07

19 Oct '07

CALL FOR PAPERS Sixth International Workshop on Protocols for FAST Long-Distance Networks 5-7 March 2008 The Schuster Building, The University of Manchester, UK http://www.hep.man.ac.uk/PFLDnet2008/cfp.php Important Dates Initial Abstract submission: Monday 10 December, 2007 Notification of acceptance: Monday 14 January, 2008 Early (discounted) Registration: Monday 4 February, 2008 Final paper submission: Friday 22 February, 2008 Workshop: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 5 to 7 March, 2008 ------------------------------------------- With the emergence of hybrid network facilities, future networks will increasingly contain high bandwidth, high delay paths. Protocols for fast, long distance networks will have to expand from experimental testbeds and into the wider world. In that process, it is increasingly important for protocols which achieve high utilization on fast, long distance networks also to have the qualities required for widespread use, such as fairness and scalability to many users. The goal of the International Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks workshop series is to bring together researchers and practitioners from all continents in this area to exchange ideas and experience. This single-track workshop will provide researchers and technologists with a focused, highly interactive opportunity to present, discuss and exchange experience on leading research, development and future directions in high performance transport and application protocols over fast long-distance networks. In order to facilitate discussions, attendance will be limited to 60 participants. Please register early to ensure your participation. Depending on the number of people who register, we may need to restrict the number of people from a given organization to allow for a broader representation of the research community. Registration will open on 8 October 2008. PFLDnet2008 solicits papers which will further research on protocols for tomorrow's high speed Internet, at all stages along the continuum from the requirements of today's Grid networks, through optical transports, throughbenchmarking of proposals, to the selection of the next generation of TCP and other transport protocols. Participants wishing to present a paper should upload a four-page extended abstact to the submission site by Monday 10 December 2007. Final papers should be typically 4-5 pages, but no longer than 6 pages. Scope: (choose at least one of the subject areas below - multiple selections are possible) Protocol issues in fast long-distance networks: Protocol development Enhancements of TCP and its variants Novel data transport protocols designed for new Networks and Application Services Explicit signaling protocols: Optimization criteria and deployment strategies Pacing and shaping of TCP and UDP traffic Parallel transfers and multistreaming Performance evaluation Modeling and simulation-based results Experiments on real networks and actual measurements Protocol benchmarking Hardware-specific issues Transport over optical networks Protocol implementation and hardware issues (PCs, NICs, TOEs, routers, switches, etc.) End system performance Data replications and striping RDMA over WANs Application focus Requirements and experience from applications with demanding network performance requirements Bulk-data transfer applications both TCP and non-TCP based Transport service for Grids QoS and scalability issues Multicast over fast long-distance networks Fiber To The Home (FTTH) Authors whose papers are selected for presentation will have the option to submit a revised paper, to be published on the PFLDnet 2008 web site and in the PFLDnet 2008 proceedings. We propose to collect the best papers from PFLDnet 2008 and make a joint publication with those from PFLDnet 2007 in a special edition of a journal, if the authors are interested. COMMITTEES Co-Chairs: Richard Hughes-Jones (Manchester - UK) Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet (INRIA - FR) Steering Committee: Lachlan Andrew (Caltech - USA) Tomohiro Kudoh (AIST - JP) Michael Welzl (University of Innsbruck - AT) Technical Program Committee: Michael Welzl (University of Innsbruck - AT) (Co-chair) Bill Allcock (Argonne - USA) Eitan Altman (INRIA - FR) Lachlan Andrew (Caltech - USA) Chadi Barakat (INRIA - FR) Richard Carlson (Internet2 - USA) Jean-Laurent Costeux (Orange - FR) Dirceu Cavendish (KIT - JP) Les Cottrell (SLAC - USA) Michel Diaz (LAAS - FR) Larry Dunn (Cisco - USA) Lars Eggert (NEC - DE) Ted Faber (ISI - USA) Wu-Chun Feng (Virginia Tech - USA) Sally Floyd (ICIR - USA) Paola Grosso (University of Amsterdam- NL) Go Hasegawa (Osaka University - JP) Richard Hughes-Jones (Manchester - UK) (Co-chair) Dina Katabi (MIT - USA) Katsushi Kobayashi (NICT - JP) Tomohiro Kudoh (AIST - JP) Cees de Laat (University of Amsterdam - NL) Jason Leigh (EVL - USA) Doug Leith (Hamilton Institute - IE) (Co-chair) Steven Low (caltech - USA) Saverio Mascolo (University of Bari - IT) Masayuki Murata (Osaka University - JP) Anders Persson (SUN - USA) Balakrishna Prabhu (CWI -NL) Injong Rhee (North Carolina State University - USA) Hideyuki Shimonishi (NEC - JP) Dimitra Simeonidou (Essex - UK) Martin Swany (Delaware - US) Robin Tasker (Daresbury Lab - UK) Brian Tierney (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - USA) Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet (INRIA - FR) (Co-chair) David X. Wei (Caltech - USA) Eddy Wes (NASA -USA) Local Arrangements: Anne Morrow (Manchester - UK) Stephen Kershaw (Manchester - UK)

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Discussions at OGF 21
by Freek Dijkstra 18 Oct '07

18 Oct '07

For those who haven't been at the OGF, there have been two NML-WG sessions at OGF 21: http://www.ogf.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=894 http://www.ogf.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=895 Below are my personal notes (these are NOT the meeting notes!!) I wrote it for someone else and my own reference, but mail them to the list, as they may be useful to others. As you can see, the first day consisted of 4 talks of 10 minutes, which together took all 90 minutes of the session. :-) The Tuesday session was for discussions. My goal was to define a list of "buckets" (modules or schemas that are (mostly) independent subtopics of the larger concept of "network descriptions"), and decide which subtopics should NOT be part of NML, effectively limiting the scope of the working group. See my mail of May for a list of "buckets": http://www.ogf.org/pipermail/nml-wg/2007-May/000005.html In addition, Anand Patil suggested a new subtopic, I hadn't thought of yet: time-based information. However, we didn't do this. Instead, we defined use cases and topics, which was also a very fruitful discussion. Below, I'll quote the topics we came up with. In addition to this discussion, we made another in my opinion very import decision: ask each creator of an existing schema (e.g. at least NM-WG schema, cNIS and NDL, and perhaps the schema used by Grid5000 as well) and model that in UML, and give that as input to the NML workgroup. This was already suggested by John Vollbrecht on the list, and repeated at the session by Martin Swany, and I wholeheartedly agree that this is a good way forward: with this, we can easily see the commonalities between the existing work, and use that as a starting point. Use Cases --------- Use cases are example applications. NML should meet the requirements of these apps. This list was compiled at a discussion at OGF 21. - perfSonar: network measurement - needs concept of end points and actual network connection in between. - description of the entire network connection (the tandem of individual link connections) - fault isolation - different levels of abstraction - pointers to information services with detailed/other/more information - filters showing subset of entire network (e.g. only allowed/available resources) - bandwidth on demand service - needs concept of end points and potential network connection in between - need time information, start time, end time, ... - link-characteristic: bandwidth, jitter, etc. - concept of "variable" end point (any cluster meeting other requirements) - path finding - (PCE in GMPLS terminology), need to specify link weight - is the path computation element part of NML or would it use NML? - need hooks to authorisation, policy (including device/configuration based policies), reservation/usage database - do we need pointers from NML to auth/usage, pointers from auth/usage software to NML, or include auth/usage information in NML? - description of the entire network connection (the tandem of individual link connections) - domain abstraction - inventory - shared links (both conflict of resources; shared risk links?) - multilayer (layer 2, layer 3 characteristics for a link) - logical framework - links in a network connection are transitive - semantical framework to allow logical reasoning on network elements Existing Work ------------- - Network Description Language (NDL) RDF Schema by the System and Network Engineering group of the University of Amsterdam. - the UML schema used in perfSONAR for network description - Network descriptions used in Grid5000 - the UML schema used in the cNIS project in GÉANT 2 for network description - AutoBAHN stitching framework See GÉANT2-07-066v5 - Deliverable 3.5.3 - Report on Testing of Technology Stitching.pdf Topics ------ - visualization - path finding - network inventory - network measurements Buckets ------- Buckets are more or less separate topics. Ideally, there should be few dependencies between the different buckets/topics/subjects/umbrella/schemas/ontologies. - Topology (single layer) e.g. devices, (virtual) interfaces, links, network connections. Re-use existing terminology? e.g. ITU-T G.805, Graph theory, GMPLS, ... - Physical equipment e.g. physical devices, locations, geographic location - Organisational boundaries e.g. domains, owner domain, administrative domain, organization/people - Device/domain capabilities can switch (at which layer), interworking, possible labels - Device configuration internal link connections, available labels - End-to-end network connection usage (path setup request, reservation ID, specific path, hops) - Time-based data Current status, snapshot or time-based, change management, ... - Technology characteristics Thus meta-data to describe a technology, not technologies itself. e.g. layer, technology, adaptation - Circuit switched properties e.g. labels, channels, capacity - Packet switched properties e.g. source & destination labels, buffers, packet size, bandwidth - Layer 1 specifics e.g. TDM, WDM, Fiber, UTP, wireless, Fiber bundles (ducts), OTN, ... - Layer 2 specifics e.g. Ethernet (MAC + VLAN), ATM, PPP, L2TP, Myrinet/Infiniband, ... - Layer 3+ specifics e.g. IP, TCP, ... - Policies Authentication, authorisation, ... - Scheduling Reservation, ....

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Dinner
by Freek Dijkstra 16 Oct '07

16 Oct '07

To those who are in Seattle: feel free to join us for dinner tonight and continue the talk on NML in an informal setting. Meet 06:45 PM in the hotel lobby if you're interested. Regards, Freek

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Fwd: Network Markup Language Working Group (NML-WG)
by John Vollbrecht 15 Oct '07

15 Oct '07

Begin forwarded message: > From: John Vollbrecht <jrv(a)internet2.edu> > Date: October 15, 2007 8:58:41 AM GMT-04:00 > To: Martin Swany <swany(a)cis.udel.edu> > Cc: John Vollbrecht <jrv(a)internet2.edu>, ghpn-wg(a)ogf.org > Subject: Re: Network Markup Language Working Group (NML-WG) > > Martin and Paola - > > Thanks for the reminder of this, and I hope you make good progress > on creating NML. > > I am not expert at data base representation methods, but it does > seem that it would be good to have a common understanding of what > is to be described. I know that at least two methods of > representation - NDL and the NMWG schema - are close. Coming to > agreement on a common method would be wonderful in terms of getting > applications developed in different "spheres of influence" to be > able to work together. I believe an (at least informal) minimal > goal of this group is to define a "data model" such that both NDL > and NMWG methods (if they continue independently) will be able to > do a mechanical translation between each other. > > This ability to do mechanical translation implies that both have a > common data model that is represented in different form. I > suggest that this data model be the first item of work for the > group, rather than trying to decide which representation method the > group will choose - since at a minimum both should be possible. > > If a common data model is chosen, then perhaps discussion of the > best way to represent it for different (or all) applications can > follow. > > Of course, there is the question of how a common data model is > represented in the first place. I am not sure what this should be, > but I suggest that a UML representation or a Entity Relationship > model - something graphical - might be useful. > > I hope this is helpful. Best luck to all in working this out - > > John > > On Oct 14, 2007, at 7:56 PM, Martin Swany wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> Sorry for the wide distribution. We wanted to make you aware >> (remind you in some cases) of the new working group called >> the Network Markup Language WG (NML-WG.) From the charter: >> >> "The purpose of the Network Mark-up Language Working Group is to >> combine efforts of multiple projects to describe network >> topologies, so that the outcome is a standardised network >> description ontology and schema, facilitating interoperability >> between different projects." >> >> The relationship of this group to the NM-WG is obvious as >> network measurement are a key user of representations of >> network topology. For the GHPN, those interested in dynamic >> Grid networks should be interested in the NML-WG as it >> represents a basis for topology exchange and pathfinding. >> >> Essentially, many groups have a need to represent network >> elements, and we believe that a single representation is ideal. >> That's a little misleading in that various levels of resolution >> make sense at different times, but some of us have the sense >> that a single representation framework can accomplish that. >> >> For more details, to participate, or to throw fruit and tell us >> the problem is solved/unsolvable/irrelevant or just plain >> out of our feeble depth, please join us in Seattle at OGF21. >> >> best regards, >> Martin and Paola >> >

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