ATEAM Launches With Completion of First Test Campaign; Labs Partner To Investigate Complex Networking Issues Within Internet2 And Beyond.

Business/Technology Editors

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 29, 2002

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."

About BCIT

The Internet Engineering Lab (IEL) is the first open & advanced Internet facility for applied R&D in networking technologies in Canada, and is a part of British Columbia's premier polytechnic institution BCIT. Focused on Internet (Layer 3) problems, the lab concentrates largely on the study of design and management of next-generation Internet networks. Among the lab's pursuits is also the study of issues surrounding routing policies in the Internet, particularly with the route registries and constraint-based and multicast routing. The IEL is one of the official testing labs for CANARIE, Canada's advanced Internet development organization that connects universities across Canada, and engenders collaborative efforts in the area of advanced Internets. http://www.tc.bcit.ca/gait/iel

About CalNGI

The CalNGI Network Performance Reference Lab (NPRL) is located in the California Next Generation Internet Application Development Center at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. CalNGI was created by a partnership with CommercNet and the State of California, Technology, Trade & Commerce Agency. The CalNGI NPRL serves CommerceNet awardees developing next generation technology and participates with other organizations involved in the development and deployment of next generation network technology. For more information on the California, Technology, Trade & Commerce Agency, see http://commerce.ca.gov/state/ttca/ttca_homepage.jsp for more information on CalNGI, see http://www.calngi.org/; for more information on the San Diego Supercomputer Center, see http://www.sdsc.edu/.

About CENTAUR Lab at North Carolina State University

The Centaur Lab at NCSU serves as a focal point within North Carolina for collaborations between state and national research and education networking communities and their corporate networking partners. It is the home of the North Carolina Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (NC-ITEC) one of two ITECs chartered by Internet2 as a national test lab. Centaur also provides testing and research services for the North Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI), a statewide GigaPOP. For more information, please see http://www.centaurlabs.com/ and http://www.nc-itec.org/

About ITEC-Ohio

ITEC-Ohio is a state of the art network laboratory located at OARnet, an Ohio Internet Service providing network services to education, research and government in Ohio. OARnet also serves as the Ohio Valley GigaPoP for Internet2, connecting nine state universities to Abilene. ITEC-Ohio is one of two national Internet2 Technology Evaluation Centers. As a regional center of advanced engineering within the Internet2 community with more than 40 academic, corporate and collaborative partners, the ITEC-Ohio laboratory supports research, testing and evaluation of new Internet technologies, as well as network curriculum at colleges and universities throughout the state and the region. ITEC-Ohio takes ideas from the laboratory, deploys them in large-scale test environments, evaluates them, and passes the results on to higher education, research communities, corporations and government agencies.

For more information, please see our website: http://www.ateam.info/.