GENI Quarterly Status Report - March 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 involved providing support to other Cluster B members to enable vertical integration (e.g., Raven, GpENI), and also promoting the use of GENI to computer science educators at the annual SIGCSE (Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education) conference. In addition, we continued to improve the usability of Gush by enhancing the functionality of the XML-RPC interface, and added additional documentation to our website regarding sample Gush usage cases. Lastly, we prepared a demonstration of the command-line interface of Gush for GEC4. 1.1. Milestones Achieved a. Website and user documentation (6 mo) - The first milestone achieved was the creation and "release" of our official project website. Though the website has been up and running since December 2008, we added clarifying documentation to several sections regarding the installation and use of Gush. We also added example application scenarios and the corresponding configuration files for Gush so that users can download and run simple examples easily. We plan to continue adding additional examples and documentation in the upcoming months. b. GEC demo (8 mo) - The second milestone achieved was the public demonstration of the usability of Gush at GEC4 in Miami. For this demo, we showed how Gush can be used to run a simple experiment on PlanetLab. We also added the ability to run experiments on GpENI while at GEC4. 1.2 Deliverables Made The past three months of work on Gush have resulted in progress towards four of our deliverables: code development, code release, code demonstration, and documentation. In terms of code development, we added additional functionality to the XML-RPC interface and command-line interface to facilitate easy integration with Raven and GpENI. In terms of code release and documentation, we updated our website with details about installing and running Gush, and included documentation describing several simple examples on PlanetLab and GpENI. In terms of code demonstration, we presented the functionality of the Gush command-line interface at the GEC4 demo session. 2. Description of Work Performed 2.1 Activities and Findings The main activities for the past three months have focused on improving usability, preparing a demonstration, writing documentation, and promoting the use of Gush/GENI in the classroom. In addition, we have spent a good bit of time providing support to other Cluster B groups in order to enable integration. We also recruited two new undergraduates at Williams to work on the design and implementation of Gush this summer. The PIs are Jeannie Albrecht and Amin Vahdat. Other participants to date include two undergraduates at Williams and a graduate student at UCSD. 2.3 Publications 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 To help find Gush users and promote the use of PlanetLab/GENI in the classroom, Jeannie presented a paper at SIGCSE that described an undergraduate Distributed Systems course. Students in the course completed several projects that were deployed on PlanetLab. These projects exposed students to the real challenges involved with managing large-scale applications across the wide-area. The paper was well received and generated several good conversations regarding undergraduate education in systems and networking. 2.5 Collaborations Our main collaboration to date has been with John Hartman at the University of Arizona. We are working on integrating Gush and Raven. We also worked with the GpENI group at GEC 4 to get Gush running on their infrastructure. In addition, we remain in contact with groups at UMass and the University of Washington 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.