[AG-TECH] Bridge Traffic

[Todd Zimmerman]

Hey All,

Thought I'd bring up a subject that will become more and more of an issue as we head towards HD/DV
video.

I got a report from the campus security administrator about an extremely high amount of traffic
to/from our WestGrid AG3 Bridge machine on Monday morning.  It was about 4.5 GB in about a 4 hour
period.  While this amount of traffic is fine for any traffic going over the research networks
(ca*net, Internet2, etc etc) - this traffic was routed over the commodity Internet to Finland.  The
problem is that unlike research network traffic, commodity Internet traffic isn't free... so campus
network administrators usually will ask about high amounts of traffic routing to the general Internet.

I assume someone was testing DV and/or HD video and was using our bridge as the logs seem like
legitimate AG3 bridge usage.

We haven't formally decided as an organization if we will set up our own bridge registry just for
WestGrid users etc or continue to offer a bridge to the greater AG community.  I hope we will
continue offering the bridge for all use as I like the idea of having high quality bridging
available to all AG users; however, as traffic increases the demands on the environment will change.

In general, I guess I am just asking the AG community to be aware of what demands they are making on
the bridging systems. If you are connecting from the general Internet (not a university campus), the
bridge operator may be paying for this traffic.... and if you are using DV/HD, this is an _enormous_
amount of traffic.  Eventually the campus network admins will shut us down ;-)

Just my 0.02

Todd

-- 
Collaboration & Visualization Technician
WestGrid - www.westgrid.ca
IRMACS - www.irmacs.com
Ph. 604.268.6979
Todd Zimmerman - toddz at sfu.ca