Collaborative Research: SI2-SSE: Pythia Network Diagnosis Infrastructure (PuNDIT)

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

In today's world of distributed collaborations of scientists, there are many challenges to providing effective infrastructures to couple these groups of scientists with their shared computing and storage resources. The Pythia Network Diagnostic InfrasTructure (PuNDIT) project will integrate and scale research tools and create robust code suitable for operational needs to address the difficult challenge of automating the detection and location of network problems. PuNDIT will build upon the de-facto standard perfSONAR network measurement infrastructure to gather and analyze complex real-world network topologies coupled with their corresponding network metrics to identify possible signatures of network problems from a set of symptoms. For example if the symptoms suggest a router along the path has buffers configured too small for high performance, Pythia will return a diagnosis of "Small Buffer". If symptoms indicate non-congestive packet-loss for a particular network segment, the user can be notified of a possible "Bad Network Segment". A primary goal for PuNDIT is to convert complex network metrics into easily understood diagnoses in an automated way.