Introduction

To check if the network supplies sufficient bandwidth between IPP Jülich and FOM Nieuwegein for the remote participation services, some performance tests were executed between these sites and some other, control sites situated at the network providers along the route and at Utrecht University (UU). The sites are described more precisely further on in section 3.

The measurements are performed with a package called RTPL ( Remote Throughput, Ping and Load) developed by the Institute of Computational Physics at Utrecht University. Several, basic aspects of the network performance are measured by this package. In fact the real measurements are performed by standard software. The package uses scripts to invoke the net performance software. These scripts are also responsible for the sampling and storage of the results. The presentation of the results is a separate part. It is Web based and dynamic: the user can select various views at the data. In section 2 the package will be described in greater detail.

At the moment the RTPL is only available for the Unix operating system. The reason is that the mechanisms to do the measurements at remote sites (remote shells) is a standard for Unix but not for Windows NT/9X: there are implementations of remote shell servers for Windows, but they are in general proprietary or not very secure. The used net performance software and scripting language are however available for Windows NT/9X. Please note that the Web presentation is platform independent.