ISOC Grant Awarded for NTP

In March of 2010, Harlan Stenn applied for a US$10,000 grant to help NTP's Public Services Project from the ISOC Community Grants Programme, on behalf of the NTP Forum.

In early June of 2010, ISOC publicly announced the winners and we were very pleased to be among them.

The grant required US$2,500 in matching funds, which were provided by the NTP Forum. Here's how we said we'd use the money:

What Actual Cost Orig. Est.
Firewall machines 2094.00 2000.00
Buildbot machine 5897.10 6000.00
Miscellaneous Hardware   3000.00
- two 48-port HP Procurve switches (inc tax/freight) 1786.61  
- psp6/psp-dev atom boxes 1210.49  
- Misc hardware 11.80  
Labor 1500.00 1500.00
TOTAL 12500 12500

Firewall machines

Our previous firewall machine was an older, low-capacity (CPU speed, memory), single machine, with 100mbps network cards and no room for expansion.

We purchased two new machines (each with more CPU speed, more memory, and gigE network cards) and set them up in failover/redundancy mode. They have enough CPU and memory that we are able to use them to also offer internal core production services for greater performance and reliability.

Buildbot Virtual Machine

Over the years, our Q/A and development resources have been steadily shrinking. This grant has allowed us to purchase a dual 6-core Nehalem-based Q/A system that will give us concurrent access to many different virtual machines running a wide variety of platforms.

Our goals include:

  • A tinderbox to capture compile-time warnings and platform build breakage.
  • Regression testing via a unit test suite.
  • Operational testing to ensure end-user interface and internal sanity.
  • Developer access to private VM instances for development on specific platforms.

Continuous testing will be managed via an instance of BuildBot. Custom software is being written to handle VM management.

A complicated solution is required in order to fulfil the NTP Project's requirements in supporting hundreds of platforms from the latest releases to decades old. Using virtual machines gives us a low-power, space-saving means to further the development of NTP without worrying about legacy platforms and code breakage.

We expect to have an initial setup operational around the end of January 2011.

Miscellaneous Hardware

We had exceeded the capacity of our previous network switches, in both the number of available ports and the bandwidth. We were able to purchase and install two 48-port HP Procurve switches, giving us the ports and bandwidth we need.

In our desire to meet our computing load needs and also reduce our usage of electricity (and cooling), we purchased two (low power) Atom boxes. One of these boxes is used for back-end production site support, the other is being set up to be used by NTP Developers, and will be able to boot a number of different OSes.

The remaining bit of money in this budget will be used for purchasing some cables and connectors.

Labor Costs

A fairly large amount of extra work was required to put the hardware purchased by this grant into production. While the labor funds in this grant are nowhere near commensurate with the level of effort required to install the hardware, every little bit helps. $1000 is for HarlanStenn and $500 is for SteveKostecke.
Main.ISOC201003Grant moved from Main.ISOC20100Grant on 14 Jan 2011 - 01:31 by HarlanStenn - put it back
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