Advanced Visualization Communication Toolkit Project

Project Personnel

Deborah Agarwal ( DAAgarwal@lbl.gov ) and

Joshua Boverhoff. ( JRBoverhof@lbl.gov )

Abstract:

The large data sets being generated by scientific researchers and the distributed nature of the Science Grid resources will require the development of visualization software that adapts to the dynamics of the underlying networking infrastructure in order to efficiently utilize the available resources. The advanced visualization communication toolkit will allow visualization applications to have direct access to network status information and to directly control communication protocol and network behavior. This will allow visualization applications to adapt to changing networking infrastructure and provide real-time feedback to the user regarding the state of the network. The toolkit will take advantage of services such as security, network performance monitoring, and event services as they become available within the DOE Science Grid. These capabilities will allow multiple sites with heterogeneous capabilities to be interacting with the data simultaneously, thus providing a significant new capability for collaborative visualization.

Secure network monitoring:

The first step in this project has been to design and build a secure, real-time network monitoring capability that leverages off of the existing network measurement tools and capabilities. Our design uses the Akenti authorization system and SSL secure transport to provide authentication and authorization of requests for active monitoring. The cuurent monitoring can determine UDP and IP multicast connectivity, UDP and IP multicast round trip time, TCP throughput, and UDP throughput (using iperf). We are currently working on adding a test that will make TCP tuning suggestions and test the achieved throughput using iperf. The network monitor will be able to run as a stand-alone application or as part of a visualization application either on demand or as a daemon.

Our network monitoring development effort has attracted interest in release of the secure real-time monitoring tool as a separate software component. We have thus released it as a separate package as well as including it in the visualization communication toolkit. The nettest secure network monitoring tool is available at http://www-itg.lbl.gov/nettest/.

Integration with Applications:

The next step of the project will be to integrate the network testing capabilities into a visualization aware middleware layer that can use the information to tune the data transfer to fit the network capabilities. Network information will be gathered before and during execution of the application to allow the visualization to make effective use of the available bandwidth. Our long-term goal is to have the middleware layer translate the available network capabilities into visualization capabilities allowing the visualization to think in terms of means of breaking down the data for transmission across the net rather than directly about the network capabilities.

Recent Accomplishments:

During the first year of the project we focussed on the creation of a secure network test framework. The framework is now publicly available at http://www-itg.lbl.gov/nettest/.

Project Details

Introduction

Background and Significance

Method

Summary

Expected Collaborators

References

Glossary

Please also visit the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Home Page. LBL Imaging and Distributed Collaboration Group Home Page. LBL Visualization Group Home Page. The Advanced Visualization Communication Toolkit Homepage.

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The Advanced Visualization Communication Toolkit Project research and development is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division.