Draft Notes

I.  Participants
Michael Behringer, DANTE
Suzanne Burgess, DynCorp/FNC
Woohyong Choi, KAIST
Kilnam Chon, APAN/KAIST
John Dyer, TERENA
Lawrence Law, HARNET
Ingrid Ledererova, Czech Republic
Bill Manning, USC/ISI
Kevin Meynell, TERENA
Bohumila Mullerova, Czech Republic
Forencio Utreras, REUNA
Karel Vietsch, TERENA

II.  Actions
- Usage statistics for the TF-CACHE cache will be mailed to the list (John Martin)
- Plan involvement and establish relationship with the different caching initatives and provide regular reports on caching efforts to the main CCIRN mail list and the CCIRN Caching mail list.

III.  Proceedings
A.  TERENA Task Forces on Caching (TF-CACHE and COM-MESH)
Established earlier this year, TF-CACHE and COM-MESH, involve people around Europe to discuss specific problems related to caching.  Currently more than 40 countries are exploring efforts to reduce traffic on the  saturated links to the U.S.  COM-MESH is establish a caching hierachy, while the TF-CACHE is working on the deployment of caching hierarchy in Europe.  John Dyer provided some statistics on Internet usage in Europe illustrating the need for caching.  More than 70% of the hits are for .COM addresses in the U.S.

As a first step, the group moved parts of the .COM domain  into a Europe-based cache.  Early results of the establishment of that cache resulted in a drop to 40% of the requests for .COM going to the U.S.  The cache satisfied 40% of the requests for .COM addresses and an additional 8% were satisfied by requests from siblings.  (Since the cache is a research project, the issues related copyrights are not addressed.)  Furture plans for the task force include adding another TLD like .ORG to the cache.

Several  problems were identified in this caching work.  First , the current statistics are not consistant and therefore analysis is not possible.  ICP traffic can swamp a heavily used pipe and there are transit problems associated with the caching project.  Finally, there are difficulties tracking over international lines.  To solve these problems, a statistics package will be developed and could include log analyzer requirements and will track incoming and outgoing traffic. Furthermore, there is not one cache pipe for TEN-34 network, which is the network most used for quering siblings for an address.

The URL for more information on the group is http://www.ternena.nl/task-forces/tf-chic and people are welcome to joing the mail list by sending an e-mail to mailserver@terena.nl, with the following message "subscribe TF-CACHE yourname".  The next meeting of the TF-CACHE will be in Amsterdam in September.  For information on high quality indexing activites can be found at http://www.terena.nl/projects/choc

B.  Status of Caching in Asia/Pacific
The Asian-Pacific region has not yet organized caches on its research networks, but there are plans for caching on the networks.  The three research networks, APNG, APAN, and AI3, have differing pipes, and caching stations need to be coordinated and placed.  For example, Japan is doing caching but it needs coordination.

C.  NLANR Cache Workshop in the United States
The NLANR Cache Workshop was held in Boulder Colorado from June 9-10 and the next workshop will be in December or January.  Papers and discussions at the workshop covered a variety of topics, Kilnam Chon reported.  Bill Manning asked if changing local topology and moving chaches in response to the change was discussed at the workshop.   TERENA and DANTE stated that issue was being considered for their caching work.  It was noted that for countries with a simple topology, like New Zealand, Australia, and eastern European countries, caching is used as it is easier to configure if there is only one international link.

The URL for the workshop is http://www.nlanr.net/Cache/Workshop97

D. Discussion
The group discussed whether the CCIRN Caching working group was replicating work already in progress elsewhere. With major workshops and coordination already underway where caching engineers exchange information, it was decided that the efforts of the CCIRN would be best utilized through representation at  workshops and other caching forums with regular reports back to the CCIRN mail list on the outcomes and accomplishments of those groups. Therefore, it was decided that the Caching working group would recommend that the full CCIRN support the continuation of annual/bi-annual caching workshops and the CCIRN caching working group would disband.  Since there is some concern about the continual funding for these workshops, the CCIRN Caching working group also recommended that agencies represented at the CCIRN support funding of these workshops.