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 cachinginitatives and provide regular reports on caching efforts to the main CCIRNmail 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 peoplearound Europe to discuss specific problems related to caching.  Currentlymore 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 inEurope.  John Dyer provided some statistics on Internet usage in Europeillustrating the need for caching.  More than 70% of the hits arefor .COM addresses in the U.S.

As a first step, the group moved parts of the .COM domain  intoa Europe-based cache.  Early results of the establishment of thatcache 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 additional8% were satisfied by requests from siblings.  (Since the cache isa research project, the issues related copyrights are not addressed.) Furture plans for the task force include adding another TLD like .ORG tothe cache.

Several  problems were identified in this caching work.  First, the current statistics are not consistant and therefore analysis is notpossible.  ICP traffic can swamp a heavily used pipe and there aretransit problems associated with the caching project.  Finally, thereare difficulties tracking over international lines.  To solve theseproblems, a statistics package will be developed and could include loganalyzer requirements and will track incoming and outgoing traffic. Furthermore,there is not one cache pipe for TEN-34 network, which is the network mostused 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 researchnetworks, but there are plans for caching on the networks.  The threeresearch networks, APNG, APAN, and AI3, have differing pipes, and cachingstations need to be coordinated and placed.  For example, Japan isdoing caching but it needs coordination.

C.  NLANR Cache Workshop in the United States
The NLANR Cache Workshop was held in Boulder Colorado from June 9-10and the next workshop will be in December or January.  Papers anddiscussions at the workshop covered a variety of topics, Kilnam Chon reported. Bill Manning asked if changing local topology and moving chaches in responseto the change was discussed at the workshop.   TERENA and DANTEstated that issue was being considered for their caching work.  Itwas noted that for countries with a simple topology, like New Zealand,Australia, and eastern European countries, caching is used as it is easierto 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 replicatingwork already in progress elsewhere. With major workshops and coordinationalready underway where caching engineers exchange information, it was decidedthat the efforts of the CCIRN would be best utilized through representationat  workshops and other caching forums with regular reports back tothe CCIRN mail list on the outcomes and accomplishments of those groups.Therefore, it was decided that the Caching working group would recommendthat the full CCIRN support the continuation of annual/bi-annual cachingworkshops and the CCIRN caching working group would disband.  Sincethere is some concern about the continual funding for these workshops,the CCIRN Caching working group also recommended that agencies representedat the CCIRN support funding of these workshops.