Cndnsd Vrsn: 4 PM Thursday April 25th ACS Room 123- Maximizing Bandwidth with Web100 and Net100
The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users
Group (FRUUG) will be held at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, April 25th.
Peter O'Neil from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
will talk about two federally-funded projects whose goals are
to maximize the bandwidth that can be used for both Web and
general IP network traffic-- the Web100 and Net100 projects.
The talk will cover the problems and goals addressed in the NSF-funded Web100
Project. It is common for applications, hosts, researchers, and others to be
unable to take advantage of the national high performance network growth in
bandwidth and accessibility. Without expert attention from network engineers,
users are unlikely to achieve even 10 Mbps single-stream TCP transfers, despite
the fact that the underlying network infrastructure can support data rates of
100Mbps or more. The Web100 project was created to reduce the "wizard gap"
by producing a complete host-software environment that will run common TCP
applications at 100% of the available bandwidth, regardless of the magnitude
of a network's capability.
A complimentary Net100 project, sponsored by DOE, supports the development of
a suite of tools for the high-performance networking community that enable
computer operating systems to automatically tune network performance. While
utilizing the Web100 code, Net100 has unique components (wide area daemons)
that probe and sense the current state of the network, the capacity of the
links, or the possible paths between sites, to get a real-time picture of the
current capacity of the network. That information is passed to the operating
system to tune TCP to the current network conditions. As the application
runs, the operating systems on the end nodes will sense if there is congestion
or if the link is being under-utilized, and actually re-tune the transfer as
it runs.
Peter O'Neil is Senior Network Engineer for the National Center for Atmospheric
Research (NCAR), a co-principal investigator of NSF and DOE funded projects, a
member of the FRGP Management Committee, and participant in other national
GigaPoP coordination initiatives. Prior to joining NCAR in 2001, he was Chief
Architect at Callisma, Inc., leading national and international projects with
network security and national telecommunications firms. For seven years, he
was an Executive Staff Member of the Internet Architecture & Technology Group
at MCI and then MCI WorldCom. His activities there included product design
and evaluation of MCI's Internet offerings and services, especially for secure
applications and transport mechanisms, and Internet policy advisor. He was
the principal architect of MCI's managed security services which included
firewall, intrusion detection, and exposure analysis offerings. Mr. O'Neil
also had the lead role in analyzing and evaluating the risk and security
issues associated with MCI's DSL rollout and other MCI product strategies for
Internet Commerce, OSS, and strongly secure transactions.
His involvement with the Arpanet/Internet began in the early to mid 1980's
while a member of the Corporate Research & Architecture Group at Digital
Equipment Corporation. Collaborating with the National Science Foundation,
DEC supported via equipment grants the creation of the Super Computing
Centers at major US research universities and the nationwide single and
multi-state regional networks used to further research and education
purposes. He also directly sponsored a wide variety of computer, networking,
and application related project technologies with leading US research
faculty and Presidential Young Investigators--all this during the time when
DEC didn't believe in the U word (Unix), TCP/IP, or workstations.
Prior to joining MCI, Mr. O'Neil was Director of Network Development at
Advanced Network & Services (ANS), a company formed by MCI, IBM, and Merit
to manage the NSFnet backbone cooperative agreement project with the
National Science Foundation. ANS was the first company to provision a
nationwide clear channel DS3 (45Mb/s) network and multiple interconnects
with Canada, Europe, and the Asia Pacific Region.
Mr. O'Neil received a bachelors degree from Boston University and a masters
degree from Harvard University. He was also appointed a Visiting Scientist
at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab and a Visiting Scientist at Harvard
University.
This meeting will be in room 123 of the CU Academic Computing
Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in Boulder. Marine St intersects
Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is on the southwest corner.
At our first April meeting, Bob Gray and Dave Clements
discussed security issues around 802.11b-based wireless networks and
Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP). Bob and Dave could
barely get a word in edgewise given the level of
interest and number of questions during their talk.
Leaving the audience astonished at how easy it is
to crack wireless network security, and appalled at
the number of networks that don't even turn WEP security
features on at all, Bob and Dave went on to discuss
ways in which you can secure your wireless networks.
Their slides are avilable in the FRUUG meeting archive at
www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.
Our next meetings include one on UNIX and MacOS X,
and an update on the ongoing fight against spam-- unsolicited e-mail.
We once again have a
Gift Certificate to SoftPro Books
to give away to a FRUUG member that has earned a
FRUUG Library Merit Badge by
reviewing one of the books in our library.
We will take a drawing at our next meeting to
give this gift certificate away.
If you're unfamiliar with the new FRUUG Library
Merit Badge program, consult the
FRUUG Library Page on our Web site.
No new books have arrived in the FRUUG library since our last meeting.
You may check out books using your business card as your
library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books
are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.
Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to discounts
on your book orders from both New Riders Publishing and O'Reilly &
Associates; refer to the FRUUG Web site for details.
