GushProto: gush-qsr-sep09.txt

GENI Quarterly Status Report - September 2009

Project: GENI Experiment Control Using Gush
Start:   July 1, 2008
PIs:     Jeannie Albrecht, Williams College
         Amin Vahdat, UC San Diego


1. Major Accomplishments
   
The main accomplishments this quarter were the completion of two
summer undergraduate research projects involving the development of
Gush.  Danny Huang (class of 2011) integrated geniwrapper into Gush
(with the public release of his code coming soon), and also added
preliminary support for running applications on Emulab resources using
Gush.  Because of Danny's work, Gush can now seamlessly run
experiments on PlanetLab, GpENI, and Emulab resources.  Kelsey Levine
(class of 2010) worked on enhancing the Gush GUI (Nebula).  More
specifically, she built a wizard and fixed several major bugs.  I hope
to use these new features to help students run experiments on
PlanetLab in my Distributed Systems class this semester, and release
the code publicly within the next few months.

In addition, I acquired more Gush users this quarter.  Several
researchers at NYU, RENCI, MIT, University of Wuerzburg, HP, and WUSTL
contacted me and requested access to the code.  I am looking forward
to receiving their feedback regarding the usability of Gush.

1.1. Milestones Achieved

a.  Website and documentation - We had no major milestones due this
quarter.  However, we have continued to improve the website and
provide enhanced documentation. As part of Danny's summer work, he
wrote additional developer documentation for Gush.  Kelsey also wrote
some user documentation for the GUI.

b.  Gush release - Although our next official milestone is early next
quarter (October 9th), this quarter we finished most of the necessary
steps for the next public release of Gush that includes geniwrapper
integration.

c. Demo/presentation - At GEC 5, I demoed the basic functionality of
Gush with preliminary geniwrapper support.  I also presented an
overview of the experimenter tools available to PlanetLab users during
the Experiment Workflow and Services working group meeting.

1.2 Deliverables Made

The past three 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, we finished integrating
geniwrapper into Gush in place of the old PLCAPI-based communication.
In terms of code release and documentation, we updated our website
with additional details for developers.  In particular, Danny created
a new page documenting the steps required to run Gush on Emulab
resources.

In addition to code development and release, I also proofread and
submitted feedback on Vic's document that cataloged the Experimenter
Tools and Services for each of the control frameworks.  In this
context, I specifically focused on the section that addressed
PlanetLab tools and services.


2.  Description of Work Performed

2.1 Activities and Findings

The main activities for the past three months have focused on helping
undergraduate students contribute to the development of Gush.  Despite
the overwhelming size of the codebase, Danny and Kelsey made great
progress this summer.  Thanks to the generous support of a GENI travel
scholarship, Danny was able to attend GEC 5.  I think this was an
excellent opportunity for him to gain a better understanding of the
broad scope of the GENI project.  His participation was also
beneficial to the long-term success of the project since he is
continuing his work with Gush this school year.

With respect to administration, I attended a meeting in Boston in July
at BBN regarding Spiral 1 status and Spiral 2 plans in Cluster B.  The
meeting gave the PIs an chance to discuss the overall status of the
cluster, and help align goals and clear up misconceptions.  I also
negotiated Spiral 2 milestones this quarter.  Major milestones include
additional coursework integration and code development.

2.2 Project Participants

The PIs are Jeannie Albrecht and Amin Vahdat.  Other participants to
date include three undergraduates at Williams and a graduate student
at UCSD.

2.3 Publications

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

I will participate in a panel/BoF session that focuses on topics
related to using PlanetLab/GENI at SOSP 2009 in October.  In addition,
I gave two invited talks and a demo at P2P 2009 in September on Gush
and PlanetLab.  Both talks were very well received.

2.5 Collaborations

Our main collaboration to date has been with John Hartman at the
University of Arizona and the GpENI group.  We are working on
integrating Gush with Raven and GpENI.

In addition, we remain in contact with groups at UMass and Duke
University about Gush-related collaborations.

We have also been communicating with Rob Ricci regarding Emulab
support in Gush.

2.6 Other Contributions

I attended GEC 2, GEC 3, GEC 4, and GEC 5 and presented at all
conferences.  I have also been involved with the Experiment Services
Working group.  I have agreed to serve as the Working group chair next
year.