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.