[e2e] web100

[Richard Carlson]

David;

Can you elaborate on your question?  Are you asking if TCP stacks are 
really a performance bottleneck, if bandwidth is a scarce resource, of if 
we have any proof of this?

 From the DOE perspective getting access to high bandwidth pipes is not the 
major problem scientific applications are running into.  There is 'easy' 
access to OC-3 to OC-48 links both within North America and around the 
globe.  (Take a look at the number of OC-3/12 links coming into the US from 
Europe.)  The problem is getting effective e2e throughput (goodput) through 
between 2 nodes (i.e., moving a GB of data from a storage system at SLAC to 
a users desktop at UTK).  The BW*delay product requires large windows on 
both end nodes and almost no loss over SLAC's campus network, ESnet, 
Abilene, and UTK's campus network.

The major problem DOE scientists have is determining why the goodput is so 
low (i.e., 5 Mbps e2e over a 100 Mbps channel).  The Web100 activities are 
designed to answer the question 'is the biggest problem in the local host, 
the remote host, or the network'.  Getting an authoritative answer to this 
simple question would be of immense value to the DOE scientific community 
and well worth the investment NSF is making in funding the Web100 activities.

Rich

At 12:20 PM 3/23/01 -0500, David P. Reed wrote:
>So, I got a press release on web100.org and its TCP improvement software.
>
>The press will probably get this completely wrong (the slant in the press 
>release is that TCP is *the big problem* and that scarce bandwidth is the 
>reason we can't use 100 MB pipes).
>
>Has anyone done any studies that would reasonably support the huge 
>investment here?
>
>- David
>--------------------------------------------
>WWW Page: http://www.reed.com/dpr.html
>
>

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Richard A. Carlson				e-mail: RACarlson at anl.gov
Network Research Section			phone:  (630) 252-7289
Argonne National Laboratory			fax:    (630) 252-4021
9700 Cass Ave. S.
Argonne,  IL 60439