Centre for Applied Network Research takes its inspiration from PingER, IEPM and NLANR

CANR

Centre for Applied Network Research

The growth of the Internet has fostered intellectual and economic growth of both developed and developing countries. Fundamental to this is the operation and maintenance of the underlying Internet technologies to keep the network functioning and performant. Our intentions include (but are not limited to) enable Pakistan's advanced education and research facilities to better understand and utilize network connections. We believe that to efficiently manage any network one needs to be able to measure it. This includes measuring and understanding current and long-term performance, identifying and reporting problems both end-to-end and within the network itself, and providing forecasts of both long and near term performance. Consequently our efforts can be summarized as development of network monitoring tools/infrastructures and measurement and analysis of computer networks.

What is MAGGIE?

MAGGIE - Measurement and Analysis of the Global Grid and Internet End-to-End Performance - is a collaborative research initiative by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) USA and NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS) Pakistan -- formerly known as NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT). It involves students and professionals from both sides working on various development and research issues related to network monitoring.

National University of Sciences and Technology

NUST was established by the Government of Pakistan in 1991 for the promotion of higher scientific education in the country, especially in the field of sciences and technology, by providing stable and disciplined academic environment together with a need based research, pertinent to our industrial requirements. Besides covering a wide variety of engineering disciplines, NUST has expanded its scope to include information technology, medical and management sciences as well. NUST, particularly School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS) has developed linkages with international universities of repute to ensure two way flow of knowledge and to avoid stagnation. Split programmes and visit of eminent professors from reputed foreign universities of UK, USA, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China and Canada to NUST is a regular feature of immense significance.

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

SLAC is one of the world's leading research laboratories. Established in 1962 at Stanford University in Menlo Park, California, their mission is to design, construct and operate state-of-the-art electron accelerators and related experimental facilities for use in high-energy physics and synchrotron radiation research. They are enriched by over 3,000 visiting scientists from universities, laboratories and industrial concerns from the U.S. and foreign countries.

We collaborate with the Scientific Computing and Computing Services (SCCS) Group which is dedicated to providing leadership and support in computing and communications to the laboratory as a whole, and to physics research, in particular. We at NUST/NIIT have focused our collaboration with respect to the network performance endeavours of IEPM and PingER.

Recent Developments

05/2009 - Fida Hussain, Umar Kalim, Noman Latif and Syed Ali Khayam completed their study of event detection algorithms and proposed a decision theoretic approach. The research publications are being submitted to SIGCOMM CCR and INFOCOM 2010.
03/2009 - Fahad Ahmed was invited to SLAC to participate in the research collaboration as a Visiting Scientist for a duration of one year.
03/2009 - Umar Kalim completed the implementation of the PingER Metrics Motion Charts Tool
03/2008 - Qasim Bilal Lone revised the implementation of the Traceroute Analysis Tool: Traceanal.
02/2008 - Umar Kalim was invited to SLAC to participate in the research collaboration as a Visiting Scientist for a duration of one year.
12/2007 - Qasim Bilal Lone was invited to SLAC to participate in the research collaboration as a Visiting Scientist for a duration of one year.
10/2007 - CANR was awarded research grant worth Rs. 37 million for the implementation of a performance measurement infrastructure for PERN. [Press release]
10/2007 - Presentation - Locating Hosts by TULIP - made at the Internet2 Fall Members Meeting by Les Cottrell
09/2007 - Faran Javed secured the award of the 2nd best final year project (2007)
08/2007 - Planet Lab landmarks to be used by TULIP in addition to PingER nodes
08/2007 - CANR arranged for a refresher course on statistics
08/2007 - CANR is actively pursuing the development & deployment of a perfSONAR based monitoring infrastructure for PERN. This project - MAGPIE - will also be conducted in collaboration with SLAC.
08/2007 - Mr. Faran Javed presented the project TULIP at the NIIT Open House and was awarded the title of the best project with an impressive poster.
06/2007 - Mr. Akbar Mehdi (alumni) has recently been enrolled in the Masters programme at Stanford.
05/2007 - TULIP, software developed under the project MAGGIE presented at the All Asia Software Competition (SOFTEC-2007, May 5-6) by Mr. Faran Javed, a senior from NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) won the prize of the 'best software' in the category of 'International Software Competition' and a cash award of US$1000.

Why MAGGIE?

The motivation behind the project is the need for better and more integrated network performance measurement and Monitoring, considering the increasing amount of computing and networking power in the scientific research community. Its purpose is to integrate numerous network and application performance monitoring tools into a scalable and secure infrastructure providing measurements, analysis and access to data. Most of the monitoring tools being developed, derive their data from the PingER project.

TULIP, software developed under the project MAGGIE presented at the All Asia Software Competition (SOFTEC-2007, May 5-6) by Mr. Faran Javed, a senior from NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) won the prize of the 'best software' in the category of 'International Software Competition' and a cash award of US$1000.

Newsletters & Flyers

Published to share recent developments including accomplishments, release of software, milestones achieved etc. March, 2007, January 2007, October 2006, June 2006.

Task Lists & Progress Reports

We maintain the progress reports on WIKI servers managed at SEECS and SLAC. Concerned students are responsible for maintaining each page. The task lists are also maintained on the same (SEECS, SLAC).

Email & Web Archives

Correspondence is done via mailing lists maggie-niit at lists.niit.edu.pk, maggie-niit at googlegroups.com and maggie-local at lists.niit.edu.pk. The web archives of 2006 and 2005 are available as well.