wiki:ShadowNet-Report-March-2012

GENI Shadownet Project Status Report

Period: Post GEC 13 Report

I. Major accomplishments

The following highlights our accomplishments during the last reporting period.

A. Milestones achieved

  • (Milestone S4.a): Develop and integrate: We completed integration of the Shadownet CM virtualization control software with the measurement and instrumentation toolset INSTOOLS. We demonstrated this ability at GEC 13
  • (Milestone S4.b): Initial version of webpage: We wrote an initial Shadownet web page which is linked off of the GENI Shadownet wiki page.

B. Deliverables made

  • Shadownet topologies can now be automatically instrumentized. Users can use Flack (or scripts) to instrumentize and view the network behavior of their Shadownet slice.
  • We added archival support so that INSTOOLs can archive Shadownet measurement data to iRODS, including support of MDOD metadata (based on the current definitions of MDOD).

II. Description of work performed during last quarter

The following provides a description of the progress made during the last reporting period.

A. Activities and findings

Our activities this last reporting period have been primarily focused in three areas: improving the robustness and reliability of the Shadownet Component Manager (CM), fully integrating Shadownet with INSTOOLs and the INSTOOLs Portal, and adding support for the iRODS archival service.

To improve the reliability of the Shadownet CM we have done extensive testing of the Shadownet CM under a variety of conditions and contexts. We tested a wide variety of possible topologies, several of them being large complex topologies with many links. Our testing helped highlight corner cases that failed to instantiate, RSPECs that we were not able to correctly handle, and cases where it took unacceptably long to create the topology. As a result, we were able to locate and fix several bugs to make topology creation more reliable. We also made changes that significantly improved the speed at which topologies are set up. Part of the performance improvement resulted from better integration with the FLACK GUI to improve parallelism. We also identified and fixed issues in the slice termination procedure where resources were not being correctly returned to the free pool.

The biggest part of our effort was was focused on fully integrating Shadownet with INSTOOLS. The Shadownet instrumentation process is now fully automated and can be invoked from the FLACK GUI. We also improved the reliabilty and accuracy of the Shadownet INSTOOLs Proxy. The proxy now does a better job of extracting the information for a particular logical router. It also can now handle and continue to operate in the face or errors much better than before. We also improved the way in which Shadownet borrrows an MC from another aggregate (in our case, the Kentucky aggregate).

A new feature we added this period is the ability to archive instrumentation information to the iRODS archive service. A nice feature of the iRODS service is that it includes a metadata catalog that can be searched. In order to support this feature, we added support to automatically generate the metadata based on the GENI MDOD specification. As a result, not only can data be archived to iRODS, but the metadata can also be searched to find data of interest. Moreover, data can be shared with other users via federated iRODS servers. We currently are operating a local iRODS server, but have the ability to federate with a single global iRODS server when this becomes available.

We demonstrated several of these features at the GEC 13 conference and showed how topologies can be quickly and easily setup/torn down across the Juniper routers at the four Shadownet sites. We also showed how Shadownet logical routers can be automatically instrumentized via FLACK and the measurement information viewed via the INSTOOLs portal.

We created an initial web page providing an overview of Shadownet system and the routers available. We plan to continue to add to this page over time, including instructions and examples of how to use Shadownet and the Juniper routers in one's experiment.

We continue to manage and operate the four Juniper routers located in Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Washington DC, and Atlanta. During this period we completed changes to the routers, particularly the router in Atlanta which was the last one added, to better enable them to support communication with external resources via GRE tunnels.

We have also continue to work with members of the LAMP/Periscope team toward the goal of integrating Perfsonar/Periscope services with INSTOOLS.

B. Project participants

The following individuals are involved with the project in one way or another:

  • Jim Griffioen - Project PI (Kentucky)
  • Zongming Fei - Project Co-PI (Kentucky)
  • Kobus van der Merwe - Project Co-PI (AT\&T)
  • Eric Boyd - Subcontract Lead (Internet2)
  • Brian Cashman - Network Planning Manager (Internet2)
  • Lowell Pike - Network administrator (Kentucky)
  • Hussamuddin Nasir - Technician/Programmer (Kentucky)
  • Charles Carpenter - Researcher/Programmer (Kentucky)
  • Emmanouil Mavrogiorgis - Research Staff (AT\&T)

C. Publications (individual and organizational)

D. Outreach activities

We gave a Shadownet Demo at GEC 13 showing how Shadownet experiments can be automatically instrumented with the INSTOOLs software via the Flack GUI.

E. Collaborations

Most of our collaborations continue to be with the Shadownet team. In particular, it involves participants from Kentucky, AT<pre>&</pre>T, and Internet2, but we have also had several conversations with our ProtoGENI and perfSONAR colleagues.

F. Other Contributions

Last modified 12 years ago Last modified on 03/31/12 13:40:36