Troubleshooting the Trouble Out of Your Networking Experience

This workshop gives attendees hands-on experience to understand and debug network issues using single-board computers running open-source network measurement tools. The computers will be connected as a local-area network (LAN) while emulating a wide-area network (WAN). The attendees also will learn about the characteristics of WANs – delays and packet losses – and how they affect the overall performance of the network and, in turn, data transfers to and from HPC sites. Participants also will be exposed to various host-level settings they can tune to improve performance. Attendees will learn to speak the language of network engineers and know what to share in a trouble ticket to help network engineers debug their performance issues.

This technical workshop is relevant to graduate computer science students and those who work in or are interested in ICT (and/or those who want to work with Raspberry Pis). The workshop requires intermediate skills in computer science and a basic understanding of Linux/UNIX, TCP/IP packets and networks. The session will be limited to roughly 40 attendees.