Changes between Version 7 and Version 8 of CRON


Ignore:
Timestamp:
04/21/10 10:12:57 (14 years ago)
Author:
Seung-Jong Park
Comment:

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  • CRON

    v7 v8  
    1515Co-PI: Rajgopal Kannan rkannan@csc.lsu.edu
    1616
    17 PoC for escalation group: Seung-Jong Park 225 571 9239
     17PoC for escalation group:[[BR]]
     18PI: Seung‐Jong Park[[BR]]
     19Computer Science and Center for Computation & Technology[[BR]]
     20Louisiana State University[[BR]]
     21289 Coates Hall[[BR]]
     22Baton Rouge, LA 70803[[BR]]
     23sjpark@cct.lsu.edu [[BR]]
     24
    1825
    1926=== Participating Organizations ===
    … …  
    3037== Scope ==
    3138
    32 This effort provides a reconfigurable optical network emulator aggregate connected to the GENI backbone over Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI). The role of optical network emulation in GENI is to provide a predictable environment for repeatable experiments, and to perform early tests of network research experimentation prior to acquiring real network resources.  The tools and services developed by this project will integrate with the ProtoGENI suite of tools.  The aggregate manager and network connections between LONI and GENI for this project will also allow other LONI sites to participate in GENI.
     39This effort provides a reconfigurable optical network emulator aggregate (CRON) connected to the GENI backbone over Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI). The role of optical network emulation in GENI is to provide a predictable environment for repeatable experiments, and to perform early tests of network research experimentation prior to acquiring real network resources.  The tools and services developed by this project will integrate with the ProtoGENI suite of tools.  The aggregate manager and network connections between LONI and GENI for this project will also allow other LONI sites to participate in GENI.
     40
     41A basic workflow of integration of CRON with ProtoGENI is similar to those of current federations among ProtoGENI and the outher clusters shown in Figure 1 because the CRON testbed adopts the architectures and protocols of Emulab and ProtoGENI and modifies them based on characteristics of different resources at CRON, such as hardware emulators, a high capacity 10Gbps switch, and users opt-in control fitted to scientific application users.
     42
     43All CRON’s resources, such as 10Gbps paths, virtual built-in optical networks (NRL, LONI, Internet2, etc), and computing resources, will be defined based on the resource specification (RSpecs). Those defined resources will be reported to the ProtoGENI Cleaninghouse so that any user at other federated sites can share them at an assigned slice. The list of defined resources, which will be given to the ProtoGENI cleaning house, are following:
     44
     45(1) four 10Gbps virtual optical networking and computing environments[[BR]]
     46
     47(2) four 5Gbps virtual optical networking and computing environments
     48To mange and exchange the information of defined resources, management, control data, CRON will host two servers, an aggregate manager and a component manager administrating resources and slices with common global identifiers (GID).[[BR]][[BR]]
     49
     50Below figure shows the implementation of Federation of CRON into ProtoGENI Cluster C at the Spiral 2[[BR]]
     51
     52
     53[[Image(CRON:CRON_implementation.png,40%)]][[BR]]
     54
     55
    3356
    3457=== Current Capabilities ===
    … …  
    4467'''2.   Rationale of CRON[[BR]]'''
    4568
    46 Although many statewide or nationwide or global high speed optical networks have been deployed, only a few groups of scientists and researchers can access the networking resources due to the following reasons:
     69CRON is the project funded by NSF MRI (Major Research Instrumentation) program, which builds a virtual high speed optical networking and computing testbed. The CRON testbed can provide up to four 10Gbps optical hardware emulated paths, four 5Gbps optical software emulated paths, and 16 high-end workstations attached to those paths simultaneously. A large number of application developers and networking researchers can share those virtually created high speed networking and computing environments without technical knowledge of networks and communications and without interference of other users. This virtual feature of CRON is exactly matched to the concept of GENI - Virtualization and Other Forms of Resource Sharing.
    4770
    48 Uncertainty: There are discrepancies between the expected and the actual performance experienced while developing new application softwares over high speed networks. And the reasons of the discrepancies can be the computing environment, networking environment, or the application software itself. Networks, especially in the early phase of deployment, can show varying levels of quality, such as bandwidth/throughput, latency, jitter and loss rate. The uncertain cause of these problems prevents the application developers from identifying their origin; they cannot tell if the problem source is the network or the software. It is critical for application developers to be able to identify the origin of problems so that they have a chance to solve them. If the problem is in the network, it is usually hard to find its origin as the application developers need to check all potential problems of all the resources utilized for development. This dramatically increases overall development time. Application developers should be able to concentrate on debugging only their software or end-systems when an unexpected level of performance is observed. To make this possible, they need to be able to decouple the networking environment from the computing environment. CRON is a decoupled networking environment that is guaranteed to provide a stable level of network quality because it is localized and fully controlled.
     71The cyberinfrastructure, CRON, provides integrated and automated access to a wide range of high speed networking configurations. Figure 2 shows how CRON can be reconfigured to emulate such optical networks as NLR (National Lambda Rail), Internet2, LONI (Louisiana Optical Network Initiative) configuration, or purely user-defined networks having different networking characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, and data loss rates. Moreover, users can dynamically reconfigure whole computing resources, such as operating system, middleware, applications, based on their specific demands. Due to the automated and reconfigurable characteristics, all types of experiments over CRON will be repeatable and controllable. This reconfigurable feature of CRON coincides with that of GENI – Programmability.[[BR]]
    4972
    50 Scarce and Expensive Networking Resources: Even when optical networks achieve a level of stability that guarantees an error-controlled environment, they are still very high-priced entities that support only a few concurrent users at each optical link. As the demand for dedicated high speed networks increases, the number of users (including both researchers and engineers) will exceed the capacity of the networks. Therefore, it is critical to serve the increasing number of users with cost-effective networking services that provide a development environment that is equivalent to the real networking services. The proposed CRON will be able to accommodate these increasing user demands with smaller investments than real multi-million-dollar optical networks cost.
     73Below figure shows the Concept of Virtual and Reconfigurable CRON Testbed[[BR]]
    5174
    52 Research vs. Production Networks: Although users are ready to use a dedicated networking environment requested by them, the users at the application layer are not allowed to modify built-in configurations of other layers, such as transport protocols and other software configurations of end workstations which are connected to the dedicated networks. This constraint will limit the scope of experiments of users. Although they have a chance to modify the configurations, they can interfere with other users at different layers, who share the end workstations. To prevent this interference over production networks, CRON will provide an independent and separate virtual networking and computing environment to each user so that each user can reconfigure any software parameters fit for user’s own experimental purpose.
     75[[Image(CRON:Concept.png,30%)]][[BR]]
     76
    5377
    5478'''3.   Architecture of CRON'''
    … …  
    5781[[Image(CRON:Connection Diagram 1.png,30%)]]
    5882
    59 Above figure shows the architecture of the CRON, which consists of two main components: (i) hardware (H/W) components, including a 10Gbps switch, a 1Gbps switch, optical fibers, network emulators, and workstations; and (ii) software (S/W) components, creating an automatic configuration server that will integrate all the H/W components to create virtual networking and computing environments based on the users' requirements. All components are connected at two different networking planes: a control plane connected with 100/1000 Mbps Ethernet links and a data plane connected with 10 Gbps optical links. To allow access from outside networks, such as Internet2, NLR, and LONI, and to connect to external compute resources, the switch at the data plane has four external 10 Gbps optical connections that will extend the capacity of CRON and integrate it with existing networks and projects for the purpose of cooperative scenarios shown in the Figure.
     83Above figure shows the architecture of the CRON,  which consists of two main components: (i) hardware (H/W) components, including a 10Gbps switch, a 1Gbps switch, optical fibers, network emulators, and workstations; and (ii) software (S/W) components, creating an automatic configuration server that will integrate all the H/W components to create virtual networking and computing environments based on the users' requirements. All components are connected at two different networking planes: a control plane connected with 100/1000 Mbps Ethernet links and a data plane connected with 10 Gbps optical links. To allow access from outside networks, such as Internet2, NLR, and LONI, and to connect to external compute resources, the switch at the data plane has four external 10 Gbps optical connections that will extend the capacity of CRON and integrate it with existing networks and projects for the purpose of cooperative scenarios shown in the Figure
    6084
    6185Due to the high cost of the network hardware emulators, we will connect them to only four optical links that will be allocated to satisfy demands over 5 Gbps of bandwidths. The remaining links will be connected to machines running software emulators. More precisely, we utilize the NIST Net emulator. This emulator can only support up to 5 Gbps of bandwidth due to computing overhead on the CPUs of the machines they run on
    … …  
    821068.      Feb 2010        -Finished Serial line control network, testing on the serial line cable because the Sun Fire x4240 machine has special pinout serial port. Asked the Comtrol company’s official technical support and got the right cable pinout design. Currently, the serial control network could work, but has some wrong display problem. Asked CCT IT support to help on making such serial cable on test.
    83107
    84 9.      Mar 2010        -Finished CRON system version upgrading from Utah Emulab stable source branch.
     1089.      Mar 2010        -Finished CRON system version upgrading from Utah Emulab stable source branch.[[BR]]
     109[[BR]]
     110
     111'''Project participants'''
     112
     113
     114Professor Seung‐Jong Park: PI[[BR]]
     115
     116Cheng Cui: CRON system lead developer[[BR]]
     117Mohammed Abul Monzur Azad: CRON system developer[[BR]]
     118Praveenkumar Shivappa Kondikoppa: CRON system developer[[BR]]
     119Lin Xue: CRON system developer[[BR]]
     120[Cheng, Mohammed, Praveenkumar and Lin are Ph.D. students at LSU.]
    85121
    86122'''Outreach activities'''[[BR]]
    … …  
    92128Our goal is to actively involve minority institutions and underrepresented students in this project. As a preliminary step towards this broader outreach, we have already established an experimental testbed connection between LSU and Southern University through LONI to perform networking experiments as shown in Figure 4. Southern University is one of the nation’s largest Historically Black Colleges & Universities. Thus the broader impact of CRON at Louisiana State will be to enable underrepresented minority institutions, which suffer the last mile problem and cannot access high speed networking resources, to perform experiments and researches. We also actively plan to publicize and advertise research opportunities in CRON at our annual departmental workshop for incoming freshman undergraduates and interested high-school students. This annual workshop in which the PIs participated in 2008 is called Computer Science Intensive Orientation for Students (CIOS) and covers basic introductions to key aspects of computer science as a discipline and a profession.  In 2010, we plan to use the workshop to introduce freshman computer science students to the challenging field of networking research through CRON presentations and demos. We also hope to actively increase undergraduate and high-school student participation in the project through summer internships as part of the LSU Chancellors undergraduate research program which involves mentoring honors undergraduate students.[[BR]]
    93129[[BR]]
    94 [[Image(CRON:Contribution.png,30%)]][[BR]]
    95 
    96 
    97 
    98 
    99 
    100 
     130[[Image(CRON:Contribution.png,40%)]][[BR]]
    101131
    102132=== Milestones ===