NETWORKS

RALEIGH, NC -- The ATEAM (Advanced Test Engineering and Measurement) lab consortium today announced the successful completion of the first of a series of test campaigns aimed at investigating complex networking issues by deploying an advanced measurement infrastructure across a wide area. The ATEAM is a newly established consortium of advanced research networking test labs distributed across North America. Founding members are the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) Internet Engineering Lab, Centaur Lab at North Carolina State University, the Ohio Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC-Ohio), the CalNGI Network Performance Reference Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the network operations center at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). Spirent Communications is the founding corporate sponsor for ATEAM’s testing activities. "These initial tests were meant to shake-out the equipment and prove we could efficiently and securely use the test sets," said John Moore, technical director for the Centaur Lab North Carolina State University. "This work sets the stage for further investigations into next generation advanced networking topics such as IPv6 and high-speed multicast." Each lab provides connectivity and test equipment that can be reserved and securely accessed by researchers interested in taking measurements and performing tests between sites. The consortium also can gather network performance metrics such as latency, throughput and packet loss as well as providing functional testing for new advanced networking technologies. The first test campaign aimed to validate the ATEAM infrastructure and its capabilities. Using Spirent Communications’ SmartBits(R) System equipment at each location, the ATEAM labs ran tests to measure packet loss at varying data rates and packet sizes. In one test, data was sent coast-to-coast at 400 Megabits per second (Mbps) across Abilene, a high-speed Internet2 backbone. While the tests were intended only as a proof of concept, they managed to discover previously undetected and critical configuration issues on an ATM switch located on the route between BCIT and the Centaur Lab. "This really shows the power of this type of testing — if we can discover problems as serious as this on a one-hour trial run, imagine what we will be able to do once the ATEAM system is fully deployed," said Eric Byres, research leader for the BCIT lab. "And the test equipment has performed flawlessly." The geographic positioning of the labs provides a distinct advantage enabling testing within the Internet2 core and across international peering points between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Future expansion of the ATEAM membership is anticipated and will include labs from across the globe. "Working with the other ATEAM lab members broadens our knowledge of network performance testing, which ultimately benefits Internet2-connected universities within the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)," said Kevin Walsh, director of the CalNGI Network Performance Reference Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Paul Schopis, senior network engineer at ITEC-Ohio agreed. "One of the more exciting aspects of the test consortium is its ability to contribute significantly to the Internet2 community's End-to-End Performance Initiative by giving us the ability to simulate application behaviors across the network from campus-to-campus."