Network performance monitoring for remote instrumentation services: The DORII platform test case

Abstract

Remote Instrumentation Services go far beyond in offering networked access to remote instrument resources. They are asserting themselves as a method of fully integrated instruments (including laboratory equipment, large-scale experimental facilities, and sensor networks) in a Service Oriented Architecture, where users can view and operate them in the same fashion as computing and storage resources. The deployment of test beds for a large basis of scientific instrumentation and e-Science applications is mandatory to develop new functionalities to be embedded in the existing middleware to enable such integration, to test it on the field, and to promote its usage in scientific communities. The DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project is a major effort in this direction. Since the performance of the network infrastructure interconnecting the instrumental, computing and storage resources heavily affects the behaviour of DORII applications, a network monitoring platform has been designed and set-up. After the description of the network monitoring platform, the paper discusses the results concerning two selected applications with the aim of finding a correlation between performance metrics at the network and application levels.