perfSONAR Endpoint Node Project

Introduction

In the past several years there has been a growing interest in small form factor, inexpensive devices that can run perfSONAR. To date these have been homebrew style projects undertaken by individuals designed to suit their particular organization’s needs and have not had formal support given by the perfSONAR development team.

As more of these projects begin to surface and people began to share ideas, it has become obvious that there is an opportunity here for the perfSONAR team to provide a solution for the community through the PEN project.

The PEN project will provide the community with support for an inexpensive device capable of performing throughput and latency testing. The end goal of this project is to make deploying large numbers of perfSONAR equipped nodes a possibility without breaking the bank.

Our target is to share examples of well-supported devices with software packages and necessary documentation available in the perfsonar 4.0 release timeframe (April 2017). Support for additional devices and further enhancements, bug fixes, etc. will continue after that.

Goals

• Provide the community with support for perfSONAR nodes that are small in form and inexpensive.
• Provide support for larger perfSONAR site deployments.
• Provide a turnkey plug-and-play solution for easy quick trouble shooting deployments.
• Provide a 'perfSONAR lite' node configuration and cookbook solutions to centralize data archiving.

Hardware capabilities (price range $150-$250)

• Available to ship in quantity
• Easy assembly and boot instructions
• 1Gbps capable (cooper)
• Minimal clock offset
• AC (external transformer) or USB power
• Standard Linux OS

Other evaluation factors:

• Architecture
• CPU
• Memory
• Internal storage
• External storage
• Power draw

Deliverables

• Hardware recommendations
• perfSONAR tools/testpoint bundles and other software solutions including OS
• Documentation including centralized MA solutions

See existing Deployment examples at http://docs.perfsonar.net/deployment_examples.html

Contact

If you have any questions, deployment examples to share, or comments please contact one of the following:

• Brian Tierney - (bltieney at es.net)
• Dan Doyle - (daldoyle at grnoc.iu.edu)
• John Hicks - (jhicks at internet2.edu)
• Antoine Delvaux - (adelvaux at man.poznan.pl)
• Michael Johnson - (mj82 at grnoc.iu.edu)
• Scott Chevalier - (schevali at iu.edu)

Or just write to the perfSONAR users group: perfsonar-user at internet2.edu