Search

JASMINx expansion project: use case report findings

High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments rely on the networks as one of the critical parts of their infrastructure both within the participating laboratories and sites as well as globally to interconnect the sites, data centres and experiments instrumentation. Network virtualisation and programmable networks are two key enablers that facilitate agile, fast and more economical network infrastructures as well as service development, deployment and provisioning. Adoption of these technologies by the HEP sites and experiments will allow them to design more scalable and robust networks while decreasing the overall cost and improving the effectiveness of the resource usage. The primary challenge we face is ensuring that WLCG and its constituent collaborations will have the networking capabilities required to most effectively exploit LHC data for the lifetime of the LHC. Network virtualisation and programmable networks are nowadays quite common in the commercial clouds and telco deployments and have also been deployed by some of the Research and Education (R&E) network providers to manage Wide-Area Networks (WAN), but there are only few HEP sites pursuing new models and technologies to build up their networks and data centers and most of the existing efforts are currently focused on improvements within a single domain or organisation, usually motivated by the organisation-specific factors. Therefore, most of the existing work known in the area is usually site or domain-specific. In addition, there is a significant gap in our understanding of how these new technologies should be adopted, deployed and operated and how the inter-play between LAN and WAN will be organised in the future. While it’s still unclear which technologies will become mainstream, it’s already clear that software (software-defined) and programmable networks will play a major role in the mid-term. With the aim to better understand the technologies and their use cases for HEP a Network Functions Virtualisation Working Group (NFV WG) has been formed within the High Energy Physics Information Exchange (HEPiX). In the initial phase, the working group was focusing on identifying the work already done, looking at the existing projects and their results as well as better understanding the various approaches and technologies and how they can be helpful for the HEP use cases. This report provides a summary of this phase and in addition attempts to identify key areas that require further work that could be discussed within the community to find synergies and understand where existing efforts should be focused. This document presents a technical overview of the existing approaches in network virtualisation and programmable networks. It starts by explaining how current paradigm shift in the computing and clouds is impacting networking and how this will fundamentally change the ways networks are designed in the data centers and sites. Cloud native networking approaches involving new topologies, network disaggregation and virtualisation have been identified as primary drivers that will impact data centre networking, which will in turn impact how data centres will be inter-connected in the future. In the second chapter which is devoted to the WAN, capacity sharing, network provisioning and software-defined approaches are discussed and key projects in the area are highlighted. This is complemented by a brief survey on the mid-term plans of the major R&E providers. The report concludes with a proposed projects areas and milestones that should serve as input in discussing the potential future work in this area. While there are many technology choices that need discussion and exploration, the most important thing is ensuring the experiments and sites collaborate with the RENs, network engineers and researchers to develop, prototype and implement a useful, agile network infrastructure that is well integrated with the computing and storage frameworks being evolved by the experiments as well as the technology choices being implemented at the sites and RENs.&nbsp

SPARQL is the standardised query language for the RDF data model. To process literal strings, filter expressions can be used with regexes. However, regex can be slow due to its computational complexity. As an initial step towards this area, we present an analysis of regex queries from a large real-world set of queries that have been posed on different SPARQL end-points that represent different domains. We report our findings and deliver some suggestions that can help the performance of regex queries within SPARQL.

This document describes two algorithms, one for source address selection and one for destination address selection. The algorithms specify default behavior for all Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) implementations. They do not override choices made by applications or upper-layer protocols, nor do they preclude the development of more advanced mechanisms for address selection. The two algorithms share a common context, including an optional mechanism for allowing administrators to provide policy that can override the default behavior. In dual-stack implementations, the destination address selection algorithm can consider both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses -- depending on the available source addresses, the algorithm might prefer IPv6 addresses over IPv4 addresses, or vice versa.

Enterprise network administrators worldwide are in various stages of preparing for or deploying IPv6 into their networks. The administrators face different challenges than operators of Internet access providers, and have reasons for different priorities. The overall problem for many administrators will be to offer Internet-facing services over IPv6, while continuing to support IPv4, and while introducing IPv6 access within the enterprise IT network. The overall transition will take most networks from an IPv4-only environment to a dual stack network environment and potentially an IPv6-only operating mode. This document helps provide a framework for enterprise network architects or administrators who may be faced with many of these challenges as they consider their IPv6 support strategies.

This document discusses which multicast addresses should be used for documentation purposes and reserves multicast addresses for such use. Some multicast addresses are derived from AS numbers or unicast addresses. This document also explains how these can be used for documentation purposes.

When deploying IPv6, whether IPv6-only or dual-stack, routers are configured to send IPv6 Router Advertisements (RAs) to convey information to nodes that enable them to autoconfigure on the network. This information includes the implied default router address taken from the observed source address of the RA message, as well as on-link prefix information. However, unintended misconfigurations by users or administrators, or possibly malicious attacks on the network, may lead to bogus RAs being present, which in turn can cause operational problems for hosts on the network. In this document, we summarise the scenarios in which rogue RAs may be observed and present a list of possible solutions to the problem. We focus on the unintended causes of rogue RAs in the text. The goal of this text is to be Informational, and as such to present a framework around which solutions can be proposed and discussed.

The eduroam federated access service is a valuable tool for supporting collaboration and resource sharing worldwide, with its primary purpose being to facilitate seamless wireless roaming between users at participating institutions. There are over 100 participating sites in the UK that have joined the UK instance of eduroam known as the JANET Roaming Service (JRS). However, while the JRS is gaining traction in deployment, there is a lack of visualisation tools for users, site administrators or JANET managers to understand and see the general roaming patterns. This paper will describe the implementation of and demonstrate a number of three-dimensional, interactive visual representations of eduroam log data from the JRS. These visualisations give a comprehensive overview of JRS roaming in the UK that, for example, communicate the ‘value’ of the service in a single image [Figure 1], give overviews at the institutional level [Figure 2] and provide diagnostic information to the service operators [Figure 3]. The software is open source and is being developed with a view to it being offered for adoption by other NRENS and the international core eduroam infrastructure

One fundamental aspect of any IP communications infrastructure is its addressing plan. With its new address architecture and allocation policies, the introduction of IPv6 into a network means that network designers and operators need to reconsider their existing approaches to network addressing. Lack of guidelines on handling this aspect of network design could slow down the deployment and integration of IPv6. This document aims to provide the information and recommendations relevant to planning the addressing aspects of IPv6 deployments. The document also provides IPv6 addressing case studies for both an enterprise and an ISP network.

The much larger default 64-bit subnet address space of IPv6 should in principle make traditional network (port) scanning techniques used by certain network worms or scanning tools less effective. While traditional network scanning probes (whether by individuals or automated via network worms) may become less common, administrators should be aware that attackers may use other techniques to discover IPv6 addresses on a target network, and thus they should also be aware of measures that are available to mitigate them. This informational document discusses approaches that administrators could take when planning their site address allocation and management strategies as part of a defence-in-depth approach to network security.

Rapport de contrat.; This deliverable documents design, features, recommendations and tools that may be used to manage and monitor a wide area IPv6 network. || Ce document décrit l'architecture, le contenu, les recommandations et les outils qui peuvent être utilisés pour administrer et superviser un réseau IPv6 à large échelle.

This report describes the activities and results of the study of security in multi-agent architectures, carried out for the Parallel and Distributed Simulation group, Sensors and Processing section, DERA Malvern, under contract CU016-0000000902.

This is an interim report from JTAP-659, identifying issues relating to Internet security for the HE community. For the purpose of this discussion document, we have broadened the scope of the study beyond secure Internet protocols to include encryption of stored information. The body of this report is a survey of secure Internet technology. It is structured as follows: 1.Introduction 2.Overview of secure technologies 3.Products 4.Review of previous reports 5.Government perspective 6.UKERNA perspective 7.JTAP-659 plans 8.Summary of key points For the convenience of the reader, a summary and set of recommendations for further studies precedes the main text.

The JISC-funded Memetic2 project was designed as knowledge management and project memory support for teams meeting via the Access Grid environment (Buckingham Shum et al, 2006). This paper describes how these capabilities also enable it to serve as a novel distributed video analysis tool to support interaction analysis. Memetic technologies can be used to record, annotate and discuss sessions recorded within a flexible, visual hypermedia environment called Compendium. We propose that beyond the use originally conceived, the Memetic toolset could find wide ranging applications within social science for virtual ethnography and data analysis.