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From 2Q09 QSR on 6/30/09:

We had multiple phone meetings between the GENI project office and Rick Tuthill of UMass-Amherst OIT. As a result of these conversations, we believe it is possible to get a VLAN connection from geni.cs.umass.edu to an Internet2 backbone site in Boston by October 1st, 2009. This VLAN connection would be used by both DOME and ViSE. We are currently working through this process. Ilia Baldine of the Orca project also introduced us to John Volbrecht of Internet2. John is interested in having a demo of ORCA using I2 as a transit provider (using I2’s DCN capability). We will be coordinating with John as we bring our Internet2 connection online.

From 2Q09 QSR on 6/30/09:

We have made significant progress on Xen sensor virtualization. Our recently submitted work demonstrates the virtualization and slivering of a pan-tilt-zoom video camera within the Xen device driver framework. In this case, slivering involves interleaving camera actuations at a fine-grain between multiple VMs. This quarter we began to look at virtualizing ViSE radars in the same way. One difficulty that arose is that unlike the pan-tilt-zoom camera, the device driver for the Analog-to-Digital card that connects to the radar does not work by default in domain-0 of Xen (i.e., the host VM). The reason is that the Analog-to-Digital card makes heavy use of DMA (since it transfers substantial amounts of data), which domain-0 does not directly support. We are currently porting the driver to work with Xen, but this requires significants changes to the driver and, potentially, to Xen itself. Others in the Xen community are also looking similar problems related to DMA and PCI devices.

As a result, to meet this Spiral 1 milestone we are transitioning to using VServers, while we work through these problems. VServers are a less powerful, but more robust, virtualization technology in wide use. For instance, PlanetLab uses them exclusively. ViSE users, which primarily use the sensor’s on each node, should not be affected by the change. We have chosen to use VServers while we work through the ADC issues with Xen because VServers allow direct access to device files from VMs, while also allowing dynamic allocation and revocation of (sensing) devices. These are pre-requisites for integrating a device with GENI. Since VServers virtualize at the OS-level, the standard device drivers for the radar’s analog-to-digital card work out-of-the-box. One side-benefit of using VServers while we work through the issues with Xen is that we will develop VServer resource handlers for Orca that other groups will be able to use (if they desire). With the use of VServers we are on-track to complete this milestone by August 1st, 2009, as scheduled. Once Xen support becomes available we should be able to switch back to using Xen easily.

Per 2Q09 QSR on 6/30/09:

We are well-positioned given the preceeding milestones to ”stand up” a functioning testbed by October 1st, 2009. This testbed will allow users to request VMs across the ViSE infrastructure and control their sensors using the Orca/GENI control framework.