Performance Working Group Charter (Draft)

In the research and education community, the ability to monitor and measure the performance of physical networks and the applications and resources that utilize them is a critical component of successful operations. The Performance Working Group will focus on the performance and measurement tools, applications, implementations, and infrastructure needed to support the performance and measurement needs of the R&E community.

The Performance Working Group will:

1. Share and build the community's information base about performance and measurement activities in the R&E community.

2. Discuss and, where possible/appropriate, document and develop "pretty good practices."

3. Identify use cases and user communities and seek to:

• share knowledge across user communities about measurement activities gained within user communities and
• leverage this information to contribute to the discovery and development of better measurement tools, infrastructure and approaches.

4. This working group encourages participation and representation from R&E organizations of all sizes and capabilities and will work to leverage community expertise:

• To provide feedback directly to the developers of the most widely used measurement and performance applications in the R&E community including NDT, OWAMP, BWCTL, the perfSONAR measurement framework, and the NPToolkit. This feedback would be designed to aid developers with ideas for enhancements, roadmaps, deployment and usability.
• To develop recommendations and approaches for measurement challenges that impact the R&E community. Examples include, but are not limited to, resolving multi-domain performance issues and challenges associated with deployment of large-scale measurement infrastructure.

The Performance Working Group is guided by these principles:

• Its work is done in the context of the Internet2 advisory structure. This working group reports progress on a monthly basis to the Network Technical Advisory Committee. Coordination with the perfSONAR developers group, and the Information and Infrastructure working groups is essential.
• Outreach to, participation from and collaboration with application user communities such as the USLHCnet and organizations of all sizes, capabilities and interests from campuses to RONs is important.
• Attention is given to commercial product capabilities and deployments as well as open-/community-source.
• Work represents the interests of the whole R&E community, not just one segment (e.g. research institutions).
• Substantial projects, such as new software development, are done as independent projects, not as part of this WG.
• Consideration is given to business and policy issues as well as technical development.

The Working Group will operate under the terms of the Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework.

Logistics

The Working Group will:

• Meet via conference calls, and will interact via mailing list and collaboration space, and any other vehicles deemed useful and open.
• Operate indefinitely under the guidance of two co-chair positions to be filled by members of the community. Approximately yearly assessments will be done to determine whether changes in structure or scope are necessary, and to confirm the continued utility of the group.