SERENATE is the name of a series of strategic studies into the future of research and education networking in Europe, addressing the local (campus networks), national (national research & education networks), European and intercontinental levels. The SERENATE studies bring together the research and education networks of Europe, national governments and funding bodies, the European Commission, traditional and "alternative" network operators, equipment manufacturers and, last but not least, the scientific and education community as the users of networks and services. The current situation is that national research and education networks and the wider research networking community in Europe are at the forefront of global technological developments. At the European level, the GEANT interconnect network was a major step forward, introducing 10 Gb/s in the core of the network and offering a wide coverage of 2.5 Gb/s capacity. It is quite likely that GEANT will deploy some links with speeds at or above 100 Gb/s during its lifetime, and even more ambitious longer-term numerical targets might now be appropriate. A similar fast development is to be expected at the national and local levels of research networking. SERENATE will investigate the strategic aspects of the development of such "superfast" networks, looking into the technical, organisational and financial aspects, the market conditions and the regulatory environment. As a result, by the end of the project, the relevant policy makers, funders and managers of research networks in Europe will have at their disposal a set of recommendations and background material that will enable them to set their policies for the further development of European research networking. SERENATE is broken down into 14 interlinked work items, each looking into certain strategic aspects that are of crucial importance for the development of European research networks.
The activity described here match closely with activities proposed for the GN2 project. EGEE as a major Grid project served by GEANT and the NRENs will collaborate in defining requirements, specifications and interfaces to new services provided by the network.
Full exploitation of these capabilities by EGEE requires their integration into the Grid middleware through appropriate interfaces and mechanisms, to allow automated access to the services provided or information derived. This means:
>> making it possible for Grid middleware to access service levels and bandwidth reservation through an interface to the control plane of the network, in order to create the connections and flows by Grid applications through the dynamic reconfiguration of the network, and
>> creating tools that allow measurements of network characteristics to be presented from a number of perspectives and for various purposes, allowing network performance to act as an input into the way Grid middleware organises and allocates resources to perform a Grid job.
SCAMPI is a two-and-a-half-year European project to develop a scaleable monitoring platform for the Internet. It also aims to promote the use of monitoring tools for improving services and technology.
The website has been updated recently to include current activities.
Transatlantic Performance Monitoring Workshop 2004
The Transatlantic Performance Monitoring Workshop 2004 is a joint effort by Internet2 and DANTE to bring together researchers from the United States and the European Union interested in building performance measurement frameworks. In specific, the workshop aims to inform members of the Internet2 E2E piPEs team, the GN2 JRA1 group, and the EGEE JRA4 group about the ongoing and planned activities of the other groups and, hopefully, lead to consensus on potential areas of collaboration.
BWCTL is a command line client application and a scheduling and policy daemon that wraps Iperf.