GENI Status Report - July 2012
Project: GENI Experiment Control Using Gush
Start: July 1, 2008
PI: Jeannie Albrecht, Williams College
1. Major Accomplishments
The main accomplishments this quarter were 1) organizing an NSF workshop on Distributed Systems education, which was co-located with GEC 14, and 2) continuing to provide support to Gush users from other universities.
1.1. Milestones Achieved
Two major milestones were achieved during this period.
- Education workshop - On July 8th, 2012 I ran an NSF sponsored workshop Designing Tools and Curricula for Undergraduate Courses in Distributed Systems. The workshop focused on developing and disseminating new tools and curricula for undergraduate courses in distributed systems and computer networks that leverage the resources available in publicly-accessible testbeds, like GENI. The 35 attendees came from a variety of backgrounds, including top-tier research universities, liberal arts colleges, and industry.
- Software and documentation - The Gush website has been updated with new documentation. It should now be easier to install and use Gush. I have created a Mac binary. I have some students testing it now for ease of use/installation bugs/etc.
1.2 Deliverables Made
The past four months of work on Gush have resulted in progress towards three of our deliverables: code development, code release, and documentation. In terms of code development and release, we have continued to improve stability and usability for the PlanetLab, ProtoGENI, and ORCA control frameworks. All code has been committed and is available for download. In terms of documentation, the Gush webpages were all updated and verified for correctness.
2. Description of Work Performed
2.1 Activities and Findings
The main activitues during the past few months have centered on supporting ORCA and DiCloud, updating Nebula with bug fixes and new features, and preparing for the workshop.
2.2 Project Participants
The PI is Jeannie Albrecht. Other participants to date include five undergraduates at Williams and a graduate student at UCSD.
2.3 Publications
Jeannie Albrecht, Christopher Tuttle, Ryan Braud, Darren Dao, Nikolay Topilski, Alex C. Snoeren, and Amin Vahdat. Distributed Application Configuration, Management, and Visualization with Plush. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), November 2011.
Jeannie Albrecht and Danny Huang. Managing Distributed Applications Using Gush. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities, Testbeds Practices Session (TridentCom), May 2010.
Jeannie Albrecht and Ryan Braud. Application Management and Visualization. In Demo Session Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems (P2P), September 2009.
Elliot Jaffe and Jeannie Albrecht. PlanetLab - P2P Testing in the Wild. In Demo Session Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems (P2P), September 2009.
Jeannie Albrecht. Bringing Big Systems to Small Schools: Distributed Systems for Undergraduates. In Proceedings of the Fortieth ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), March 2009.
2.4 Outreach Activities
The workshop aims to disseminate information to educators about how to use GENI tools in the classroom.
2.5 Collaborations
Our main cluster collaborations to date are with John Hartman at the University of Arizona, the PlanetLab group at Princeton, the GpENI group, MAX, and NetKarma.
In addition, we still remain in contact with groups at UMass and Duke University about Gush-related collaborations with ORCA, DOME, ViSE, and DiCloud.
We have also been communicating with Rob Ricci regarding ProtoGENI support in Gush.
2.6 Other Contributions
I attended GEC 2, GEC 3, GEC 4, GEC 5, GEC 6, GEC 7, GEC 9, GEC 11, and GEC 14, and presented at all conferences.
