We are planning on holding a Performance Measurement Architecture Workshop on December 11-12, 2003 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (immediately following the Bandwidth Estimation Workshop also at SDSC) to see how existing measurement projects geared towards performance issues fit together.
Many of us have been working on tools and projects within the R&E community that are involved in the measurement of networks, systems, and applications. Each of these helps us to understand how networked applications work and how performance can be maximized. However each of tools and projects only address part of the overall Internet "system" that the applications use. To understand the complete system, information must be obtained from a variety of sources and integrated. Even then there may be needed information that is missing. One reason for this is that each project generally develops tools to look at a specific area.
We believe that an overall architecture that can serve as a map for the end-to-end performance measurement area would be useful. There are already several beginnings of such an architecture, but none that include the full end-to-end path. The complete path not only needs to include the network, but also the end-stations with their hardware, operating system, and software libraries used by the application.
What is this overall architecture? That is why we want to have a workshop. The resulting architecture from this workshop should help all the current measurement projects see where they fit, how they relate and support each other, and where there are overlaps. In supporting each other it should define where there are, or should be standard protocols, formats and interfaces so that they mesh in to a larger system. The architecture should also help point out the things that are missing. Hopefully all of this would help PIs and funding agencies better understand needed work in this area and provide a framework for proposals and evaluations.
Therefore we are planning on holding a Measurement Architecture Workshop on December 11-12, 2003 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center immediately following the Bandwidth Estimation Workshop also at SDSC. This will be an invitation-only workshop of approximately 20 leaders, whom are developing systems and tools, that will draft an architecture to map out the end-to-end performance measurement area. The workshop will be partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ANI-0314723.
Deliverables from the workshop will be documents and diagrams of the agreed upon architecture that can be further discussed among the community of developers. We envision starting with a strawman architecture, and anticipate the following deliverables: