perfSONAR-PS v3.1RC1 Release

perfSONAR-PS development collaborators ESnet, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, The Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University, Internet2, University of Delaware, and SLAC Linear Accelerator Laboratory have made available the first release candidate of version 3.1 of the perfSONAR-PS software suite.

Launched in early 2008, perfSONAR-PS is a complementary set of network performance services developed for Perl-based environments under the umbrella of the global perfSONAR network performance measurement framework. perfSONAR provides network operators and users a window into the network to generate near real time performance traffic monitoring and visualization as well as diagnostic tools to quickly solve network performance problems to enhance applications.

perfSONAR-PS version 3.1RC1 includes the following updates:

• Lookup Service – This service stores, summarizes, and shares location and metadata information with the global Information Services (IS) framework. Clients can then search for this information in numerous ways, making it easier to locate resourses without asking services for information directly. New in this release is that the LS now interacts with a global directory index which allows all deployed LS servers to publish their information in a way that makes it globally discoverable. Additionally, a new client API was created to facilitate querying the now global LS infrastructure to find available services.


• LS Registration Daemon – This new package allows the administrator to publish the existence of several active measurement test points such as BWCTLD, OWAMP, NDT, NPAD or simply that a host is available as a target for ping/traceroute.


• PingER - This delay tool uses ping to measure round-trip time (RTT) between nodes. The PingER service has seen a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements since the last release.


• Status Measurement Archive (MA) – This service allows networks to monitor network elements and make available its operational and administrative status information. This service now can query several TL1 devices to archive details of Circuit/Link status information in addition to the original SNMP device support. Additionally, SNMP support has had significant performance enhancements.


• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Measurement Archive (MA) – Data from SNMP/RRD collectors (cricket, cacti, mrtg) can be used or stored in perfSONAR archives. Viz tools can then retrieve this data (supports the separation of collection and viz). Doing this makes it easy to import this data from peer domains (assuming they authorize this action). The new version now supports MRTG, Cricket, Cacti RRD data stores.


• Topology Service – This service provides the ability for administrators to make topology information about their networks available to remote clients. The new release adds additional querying interfaces that are more similar to the LS service to ensure more uniformity.

Release candidates are versions of the software that the developers have internally tested have been deemed ready for public scrutiny. The developers will address any found bugs and additional release candidates will be made available as quickly as possible. The developers are encouraging the community to help test the software and identify weaknesses or other issues. Once a release candidate has stabilized sufficiently it will be made a production release. The new complete production perfSONAR-PS release is anticipated by June 2009.

Each service is available as either a source download or an RPM package. All items are now available at a new centralized location: http://software.internet2.edu

Users are asked to report any bugs to our google-code web site issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/perfsonar-ps/issues/list

Additionally, questions can always be asked on the perfsonar-user@perfsonar.net email list



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