2017 ESnet Summer Student Projects (CS Summer Student Program)
ESnet 2017 Summer Student Project Descriptions
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA
http://www.es.net/
Are you an exceptional engineer who likes working on truly challenging projects? Are you passionate about learning and open minded about the way that networks are built? Do you have a passion for organizing and visualizing data to aid in the understanding and development of network systems? Consider spending your summer with the research and development team for Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Networking Division.
We’re a dynamic organization, highly-motivated and focused on results. Our mission: to accelerate science by delivering unparalleled networking capabilities, tools, and innovations. As an organization, we are small enough to be agile, but large enough to offer rewarding challenges on a global scale. At the core of the Scientific Networking Division is ESnet, the Energy Sciences Network. ESnet interconnects the US national laboratory system, is widely-regarded as a technical pioneer, and is currently the fastest science network in the world.
We are working at the leading edge of software-defined networking, OpenFlow, dynamic network infrastructure, network visualization, network knowledge plane, multi-domain and multi-layer architectures. The successful student will be the one that brings strong and diverse coding skills and is very self motivated.
Summer Student Projects
ProjectTitle: Network traffic analysis with pmacct (1 opening)
Required skills: Unix, Linux, programming in C, SQL, ELK stack
Abstract: [ very draft ] Essentially we would deploy pmacct, an advanced netflow telemetry tool, on one or more VMs for ESnet and see what we could make it do. We are particularly interested in how we can use it to observe the traffic matrix for ESnet traffic.
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Project Title: Advanced Ticketing System for Network Problems (1 opening)
Required skills: (See below)
Abstract: Do you like prototyping cool ideas? Does building a robust but also a learning system excite you? Do you enjoy building natural language processing systems? If yes, then spend this summer at ESnet and help us design and build a reliable system that can process incoming error messages or tickets using simple processing tools, to stream line the management process. The developed summer project will recognize incoming tickets and then create appropriate problem partitions to be addressed later.
Ideal candidates will have:
Strong programming knowledge in Java, Python, OO concepts
Some background in natural language processing such as OWL, RDF concepts.
Working knowledge of rule based learning and other machine learning is preferred.
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Project Title: Network Ontology for Multiple Tool Processing (1 opening)
Required skills: Python; Java Skills desired: JavaScript, ontology design (such as using Jython to interface Java/Python libraries), visual design
Abstract: Services interacting with the network have multiple requirements, referred to as 'Intent', which need to be satisfied by the network underneath. This usually involves understanding the intent and translating it to network specific commands, bringing together multiple network tools and techniques. In this project, the student will work on the INDIRA project which uses OWL to build an ontology for intent and network. If time permits, this information will be used to annotate visualizations of the network. During the summer, the project will involve interfacing current INDIRA Python code with Java OWL libraries for advancing the ontology.
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ProjectTitle: Software Defined Networking with Openflow (1 opening)
Required skills: Java and/or Python, basic networking knowledge, and unix administration skills
Abstract: ESnet hosts an SDN testbed leveraging OpenFlow and a circuit reservation system called OSCARS (http://www.es.net/oscars) that follows SDN principles. During the summer, we are interested in dynamically setting up multiple VPNs for multiple service demands across the SDN testbed. In addition, doing experiments with OpenFlow and OSCARS with a potential paper submitted to a conference is highly desirable after Summer.
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Project Title: Network Modeling and Machine Learning for High Performance Networks
(1 opening)
Required skills: networking, modeling, machine learning.
Abstract:Science discovery is increasingly relying on very large amount of data generated by experimentation. It is becoming very difficult if not impossible to co-locate the source of data and the processing of it. Scientific high performance networks such as ESnet enables research to be distributed and yet work with big data. This lead to an exponential growth of traffic while budget growth is linear. In the past, technology advances allowed to cope with bandwidth demands, but those advances have been slowing down in recent years.
This project consists of investigating work and research been done in networking modeling and machine learning and how this could be applicable to ESnet in order to have a more efficient and cheaper network. The expected result of this work is a survey paper with recommendation for ESnet. If time permits, a proof of concept may be developed on ESnet testbed.
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Project Title: Network and Security Monitoring and Management (1 opening)
Required skills: Basic networking knowledge, scripting with python/perl, and linux administration.
Location: LBNL
ESnet is constantly pushing the limits of networking technology and the ability to automate, secure, manage, and support cutting edge technologies. This position will work with a variety of ESnet technical staff to enhance and automate aspects of ESnet’s capacity planning process, and associated network monitoring. The student will do programming and analysis facilitating the following deliverables:
Enhance the current statistics computation mechanisms to generate reports based on links instead of half duplex interfaces.
Automate the creation of some additional link utilization graphs to facilitate analysis (for better understanding utilization burstiness).
Automate generation of reports & graphs, so that they can be generated/used on a ad-hoc or monthly basis instead of the current quarterly cadence.
Potentially re-write/transform the current statistics analysis process to use the new data backend for accessing the raw SNMP data
Some programming skills are required and a basic understanding of network protocols (UDP, TCP/IP, HTTP) would be extremely beneficial.
This is a great opportunity for a student to get their hands dirty looking closely at network device configurations and packet flows.
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Project Title: Network Security (2 openings)
Required skills: Basic networking knowledge, scripting with python/perl, and linux administration.
Abstract: ESnet is constantly pushing the limits of networking technology and the ability to provide security at the cutting edge.
An ESnet team located in Champaign-Urbana, IL is looking for a student to help with a variety of projects. Work may include developing intrusion detection policies for Bro IDS, active response to events with SDN, and adding IPv6 support to existing tools. The student may also learn some skills in the areas of incident investigation and response. Some programming skills are required and a basic understanding of network protocols (UDP, TCP/IP, HTTP) would be extremely beneficial.
This is a great opportunity for a student to get their hands dirty looking closely at network device configurations and packet flows.
Project Title: Software Switches for High Performance DTN (1 opening)
Required skills: Linux kernel performance tuning, basic networking, linux administration, scripting with python, shell.
Abstract:
ESnet expertise is in high performance data transfer through its network. It has developed and promoted the ScienceDMZ model that is now allowing modern science to be decentralized. An important component of this model relies on high performance servers specialized into the task of transferring data, the Data Transfer Nodes. With the advances of networking and storage performance, hosts are now capable of transferring files at very high rates. However, this requires to operate the host in manners that can not be achieved in production. This project will explore to utilize virtualization and containers technologies to allow for a better utilization of the resources. In particular, this project will investigate the performance of DTN in a linux container.
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- Your skills and relevant experience
- Your interest in the program
- Educational information (note: you must be enrolled into a full-time academic program at an accredited college or university)
- List your references (name, contact information, relationship to you)
