Outline

We want to support EVO (Enabling Virtual Organisations) in South Africa. The overall idea is to provide local PANDA servers for South African Virtual Organisations, as well as those already supported by EVO in South Africa (e.g. ATLAS, ALICE). With the fast national network (SANREN), local EVO servers will reduce the load on the international traffic and allow high-quality videoconference facilities for research groups in the country.

EVO@TENET

The first PANDA servers are installed at the TENET mirror.ac.za sites of Johannesburg and Cape Town which are anycasted to the institutes served by the network. The PANDA servers are running Ubuntu operating systems, and are remotely installed and managed by the EVO team itself. Our contact at EVO for this operation is Philippe Gonzales. The details of the PANDA servers are kept for reference here

Deployment timeline

• February 2009 - mid April 2009 : Initial discussions internally with SA groups - The concept of EVO is raised with research and network support groups at universities and the CSIR. Interest expressed on both sides, especially from the SANREN team for example network applications. It is initially conceived to host PANDA servers at the universities of Johannesburg and Cape Town, serving regions connected to SANREN north and south respectively.
• 21 April : Initial discussions with EVO - details of specifications of the machine required and subscription model are described in an email from Philippe Gonzales of 21/4/2009
• 25 April : First feedback and general discussion of networking situation - a general description of the network support area in South Africa is given to EVO team, outlining roles of SANREN and TENET respectively.
• 26 April : Decision to locate PANDA servers at TENET sites - after some discussions with SANREN, TENET, Meraka HPC research group and directors of IT at UCT and UJ, it is decided to have the PANDA servers located and managed by TENET at their mirror.ac.za sites in Johannesburg and Cape Town instead of at the University IT departments.
• 29 April : TENET brought into the loop - thanks to support from SANREN and universities, TENET agrees to provision the machines required. Several technical discussions ensue resulting in the decisions to deploy Ubuntu servers at the Johannesburg and Cape Town sites.
• 13 May : The discussion widens - the general discussion, dominated by SANREN, TENET and Meraka, is enlarged to include IT staff at iThemba LABS and the CHPC
• 4 June : PANDA server available at TENET Johannesburg - Patrick Holahan at TENET provides the server requested, the panda account is verified and details communicated to Philippe at EVO support.
• 10 June : PANDA server installed and configured properly at TENET Johannesburg - EVO support confirms that the new PANDA server is installed and configured and BruceBecker confirmed that the new server appears in the list of PANDA servers provided by Koala.
• 11 June : first high-quality international EVO meeting with SA PANDA server - the actual quality of EVO usage between UJ and INFN, Catania was tested. Quality is excellent. Announcement sent out to SA-CERN and sagridops mailing lists. Presume to have first multi-user meeting for SAGrid operators on Friday 12/6
• 5 August : Request for phone bridge in Cape Town : iThemba LABS hosts the SA-CERN consortium meetings and several scientists working on LHC experiments, but does not have enough bandwidth to be able to allow them to join EVO meetings as in the rest of the country. The installation of a phone bridge at TENET Cape Town was requested (again to Patrick Holahan). The request was repeated on the 14th of October.
• 9 October : audio codec upgrade causes hiccup. A server-side audio codec upgrade without corresponding koala jnlp upgrade caused severe degradation in service experienced by some, the issue was only client-side. Resolved in ticket #152
• 16 October : Discussion started with CHPC. In the continued absence of a phone bridge in the Cape Town area to provide connectivity to tLABS, a request was made to the CHPC to host an ALICE meeting. The meeting instead will be held at UCT, but discussions continue with the CHPC to configure the site to use the client.

-- BruceBecker - 29 Apr 2009