GENI Quarterly Status Report - June 2009

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


1. Major Accomplishments
   
This quarter our major accomplishments included providing support to other Cluster B members to enable vertical integration (e.g., Raven, GpENI), and also getting two undergraduates at Williams College involved in the development of Gush.  Danny Huang (junior) and Kelsey Levine (senior) are both working with Jeannie Albrecht this summer at Williams College.  Danny is integrating geniwrapper into Gush, and also researching different ways to provide better support for Gush clients in volatile networks (such as sensor networks).  Kelsey is working on improving the functionality of Nebula, the Gush GUI.

1.1. Milestones Achieved

a.  Website and documentation - All of our year 1 milestones were achieved last quarter.  However, we have continued to improve the website and provide enhanced documentation. As part of Danny's summer work, he is writing developer documentation for Gush.  Kelsey is also writing user documentation for the GUI.  

b.  Demo - We are planning another demo for GEC 5. We hope to demonstrate more advanced features of Gush, including integration with ORCA and GpENI.  We plan to demo the GUI at an upcoming GEC as well.  

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 integrated 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, and Kelsey is working on new pages on the website dedicated to the GUI. 


2.  Description of Work Performed

2.1 Activities and Findings

The main activities for the past three months have focused on getting undergraduate students involved in the development of Gush.  It takes a few weeks (or more) to teach students the background information necessary to make progress on Gush, since most undergraduates have limited prior experience with a project of this size.  However, Danny and Kelsey have been making great progress so far this summer.  We expect both students to contribute significantly to the future development of Gush.  Danny has already agreed to continue working on Gush during the upcoming school year.  In addition, we have spent a good bit of time providing support to other Cluster B groups (Raven, GpENI) in order to enable integration. 

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 

(none this quarter)

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

Jeannie Albrecht has been in contact with other educators in an attempt to organize a workshop that focuses on topics related to using PlanetLab/GENI (and other shared testbeds) in classroom settings.  In addition, Albrecht will give two invited talks at P2P 2009 in September on Gush and PlanetLab.


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.  

2.6 Other Contributions

Jeannie Albrecht attended GEC 2, GEC 3, and GEC 4 and presented at all conferences.  She has also been involved with the Experiment Services Working group.