Monthly progress report

This report is the mid-year report intended for the design concepts for the communication network for the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) facility being built at Yellow Creek near Iuka, MS. The overall network is to include heterogeneous computers, to use various protocols, and to have different bandwidths. Performance consideration must be given to the potential network applications in the network environment. The performance evaluation of X window applications was given the major emphasis in this report. A simulation study using Bones will be included later. This mid-year report has three parts: Part 1 is an investigation of X window traffic using TCP/IP over Ethernet networks; part 2 is a survey study of performance concepts of X window applications with Macintosh computers; and the last part is a tutorial on DECnet protocols. The results of this report should be useful in the design and operation of the ASRM communication network

Data communication network at the ASRM facility

The main objective of the report is to present the overall communication network structure for the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) facility being built at Yellow Creek near Iuka, Mississippi. This report is compiled using information received from NASA/MSFC, LMSC, AAD, and RUST Inc. As per the information gathered, the overall network structure will have one logical FDDI ring acting as a backbone for the whole complex. The buildings will be grouped into two categories viz. manufacturing critical and manufacturing non-critical. The manufacturing critical buildings will be connected via FDDI to the Operational Information System (OIS) in the main computing center in B 1000. The manufacturing non-critical buildings will be connected by 10BASE-FL to the Business Information System (BIS) in the main computing center. The workcells will be connected to the Area Supervisory Computers (ASCs) through the nearest manufacturing critical hub and one of the OIS hubs. The network structure described in this report will be the basis for simulations to be carried out next year. The Comdisco's Block Oriented Network Simulator (BONeS) will be used for the network simulation. The main aim of the simulations will be to evaluate the loading of the OIS, the BIS, the ASCs, and the network links by the traffic generated by the workstations and workcells throughout the site

On the Performance of Copying Large Files Across a Contention-Based Network

Analytical and simulation models of interconnected local area networks, because of the large scale involved, are often constrained to represent only the most ideal of conditions for tractability sake. Consequently, many of the important causes of network delay are not accounted for. In this study, experimental evidence is presented to show how delay time in local area networks is significantly affected by hardware limitations in the connected workstations, software overhead, and network contention. The mechanism is a controlled experiment with two Vax workstations over an Ethernet. We investigate the network delays for large file transfers, taking into account the Vax workstation disk transfer limitations; generalized file transfer software such as NFS, FTP, and rcp; and the effect of contention on this simple network by the introduction of substantial workload from competing workstations. A comparison is made between the experimental data and a network modeling tool, and the limitations of the tool are explained. Insights from these experiments have increased our understanding of how more complex networks are likely to perform under heavy workloads.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107873/1/citi-tr-89-3.pd

A real-time diagnostic and performance monitor for UNIX

There are now over one million UNIX sites and the pace at which new installations are added is steadily increasing. Along with this increase, comes a need to develop simple efficient, effective and adaptable ways of simultaneously collecting real-time diagnostic and performance data. This need exists because distributed systems can give rise to complex failure situations that are often un-identifiable with single-machine diagnostic software. The simultaneous collection of error and performance data is also important for research in failure prediction and error/performance studies. This paper introduces a portable method to concurrently collect real-time diagnostic and performance data on a distributed UNIX system. The combined diagnostic/performance data collection is implemented on a distributed multi-computer system using SUN4's as servers. The approach uses existing UNIX system facilities to gather system dependability information such as error and crash reports. In addition, performance data such as CPU utilization, disk usage, I/O transfer rate and network contention is also collected. In the future, the collected data will be used to identify dependability bottlenecks and to analyze the impact of failures on system performance

Functional requirements document for the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Scientific Computing Facilities (SCF) of the NASA/MSFC Earth Science and Applications Division, 1992

Five scientists at MSFC/ESAD have EOS SCF investigator status. Each SCF has unique tasks which require the establishment of a computing facility dedicated to accomplishing those tasks. A SCF Working Group was established at ESAD with the charter of defining the computing requirements of the individual SCFs and recommending options for meeting these requirements. The primary goal of the working group was to determine which computing needs can be satisfied using either shared resources or separate but compatible resources, and which needs require unique individual resources. The requirements investigated included CPU-intensive vector and scalar processing, visualization, data storage, connectivity, and I/O peripherals. A review of computer industry directions and a market survey of computing hardware provided information regarding important industry standards and candidate computing platforms. It was determined that the total SCF computing requirements might be most effectively met using a hierarchy consisting of shared and individual resources. This hierarchy is composed of five major system types: (1) a supercomputer class vector processor; (2) a high-end scalar multiprocessor workstation; (3) a file server; (4) a few medium- to high-end visualization workstations; and (5) several low- to medium-range personal graphics workstations. Specific recommendations for meeting the needs of each of these types are presented

Optimistic Implementation of Bulk Data Transfer Protocols

During a bulk data transfer over a high speed network, there is a high probability that the next packet received from the network by the destination host is the next packet in the transfer. An optimistic implementation of a bulk data transfer protocol takes advantage of this observation by instructing the network interface on the destination host to deposit the data of the next packet immediately into its anticipated final location. No copying of the data is required in the common case, and overhead is greatly reduced. Our optimistic implementation of the V kernel bulk data transfer protocols on SUN-3/50 workstations connected by a 10 megabit Ethernet achieves peak process-to-process data rates of 8.3 megabits per second for 1-megabyte transfers, and 6.8 megabits per second for 8-kilobyte transfers, compared to 6.1 and 5.0 megabits per second for the pessimistic implementation. When the reception of a bulk data transfer is interrupted by the arrival of unexpected packets at the destination, the worst-case performance of the optimistic implementation is only 15 percent less than that of the pessimistic implementation. Measurements and simulation indicate that for a wide range of load conditions the optimistic implementation outperforms the pessimistic implementation

File Access Performance of Diskless Workstations

This paper studies the performance of single-user workstations that access files remotely over a local area network. From the environmental, economic, and administrative points of view, workstations that are diskless or that have limited secondary storage are desirable at the present time. Even with changing technology, access to shared data will continue to be important. It is likely that some performance penalty must be paid for remote rather than local file access. Our objectives are to assess this penalty and to explore a number of design alternatives that can serve to minimize it. Our approach is to use the results of measurement experiments to parameterize queuing network performance models. These models then are used to assess performance under load and to evahrate design alternatives. The major conclusions of our study are: (1) A system of diskless workstations with a shared file server can have satisfactory performance. By this, we mean performance comparable to that of a local disk in the lightly loaded case, and the ability to support substantial numbers of client workstations without significant degradation. As with any shared facility, good design is necessary to minimize queuing delays under high load. (2) The key to efficiency is protocols that allow volume transfers at every interface (e.g., between client and server, and between disk and memory at the server) and at every level (e.g., between client and server at the level of logical request/response and at the level of local area network packet size). However, the benefits of volume transfers are limited to moderate sizes (8-16 kbytes) by several factors. (3) From a performance point of view, augmenting the capabilities of the shared file server may be more cost effective than augmenting the capabilities of the client workstations. (4) Network contention should not be a performance problem for a lo-Mbit network and 100 active workstations in a software development environment

Optimistic Implementation of Bulk Data Transfer Protocols

During a bulk data transfer over a high speed network, there is a high probability that the next packet received from the network by the destination host is the next packet in the transfer. An optimistic implementation of a bulk data transfer protocol takes advantage of this observation by instructing the network interface on the destination host to deposit the data of the next packet immediately into its anticipated final location. No copying of the data is required in the common case, and overhead is greatly reduced. Our optimistic implementation of the V kernel bulk data transfer protocols on SUN-3/50 workstations connected by a 10 megabit Ethernet achieves peak process-to-process data rates of 8.3 megabits per second for 1-megabyte transfers, and 6.8 megabits per second for 8-kilobyte transfers, compared to 6.1 and 5.0 megabits per second for the pessimistic implementation. When the reception of a bulk data transfer is interrupted by the arrival of unexpected packets at the destination, the worst-case performance of the optimistic implementation is only 15 percent less than that of the pessimistic implementation. Measurements and simulation indicate that for a wide range of load conditions the optimistic implementation outperforms the pessimistic implementation