OFUWI Project Status Report

Period: end Mar 31, 2010

I. Major accomplishments

• Small scale initial CS deployment with 3 openflow switches demo'ed at GEC 7

• OpenSAFE prototype for network monitoring and analysis

A. Milestones achieved

• Selected vendors (Completed on 01/31/10)

• Placed equipment order for 7 24-port switches with HP (Completed 04/19/10) -- delays due to delay on obtaining price quotes/discounts

• Campus small deployments (Completed before GEC 7)

B. Deliverables made

See accomplishments above.

II. Description of work performed during last quarter

A. Activities and findings

For activities, see accomplishments above and outreach activities below.

Our key findings are:

We have designed the OpenSAFE system and an accompanying language, ALARMS, for scalable and flexible network monitoring. OpenSAFE and ALARMS are based on OpenFlow. The system can perform a variety of network monitoring functions at line-rates. It also allows flexible interposition of middleboxes as well as fine-grained load balancing across a diverse collection of hardware. This system was demo-ed at GEC7, where it garnered a lot of interest from other GENI participants.

B. Project participants

Theo Benson, graduate student
Aaron Gember, graduate student
Kent Shen, graduate student
Jeff Ballard, network engineer
Dale Carder, network engineer
Mike Blodgett, network engineer

C. Publications (individual and organizational)

The Case for Fine-Grained Traffic Engineering in Data Centers
Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, and Aditya Akella, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ming Zhang, Microsoft Research

Extensible and Scalable Network Monitoring Using OpenSAFE
Jeffrey R. Ballard, Ian Rae, and Aditya Akella, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Both at INM/WREN 2010.

D. Outreach activities

PI Akella taught a course in Fall 2010 titled "Rethinking the Internet Architecture: From Theory to Practice". The course was based on reading papers from thought leaders in the field outlining various ideas for the future Internet. More importantly, the course had lab assignments based on Openflow and NetFPGA to supplement the lectures. The course was a great success and garnered broad participation from undergrads and grads, and even network engineers and professors. PI Akella is planning to leverage some of these assignments for his other courses, such as, graduate and undergraduate networking to be taught in the upcoming three semesters.

E. Collaborations

None yet.

F. Other Contributions

None yet.