wiki:GENIConcepts

Version 15 (modified by Vic Thomas, 11 years ago) (diff)

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Key GENI Concepts

This page introduces GENI concepts and terms you will need to know before you use GENI. For a glossary of GENI terms, see https://portal.geni.net/secure/glossary.html.

The GENI Portal

A web-based tool for experimenters to create accounts,

Project

A project organizes research in GENI, containing both people and their experiments. A project is led by a single responsible individual: the project lead. A project may have many experimenters as its members. An experimenter may be a member of multiple projects. The project lead is is ultimately accountable for all actions by project members in the context of the project.

The following figure illustrates a situation where a professor is the lead for two GENI projects Alpha and Beta. Each project has one of the professor's research assistant as a member. The professors and his post-doc are members of both projects.

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Slice

GENI is a shared testbed i.e. multiple experimenters may be running multiple experiments at the same time. This is possible because of the concept of a slice. A GENI slice is:

  • A container for resources used in an experiment. GENI experimenters add GENI resources (compute resources, network links, etc.) to slices and run experiments that use these resources. An experiment an only use resources in its slice.
  • The unit of isolation for experiments. A GENI experiment lives in a slice. An experiment in one slice is isolated from experiments in other slices.
  • A unit of access control. The experimenter that creates a slice can determine which project members have access to the slice i.e. are members of the slice. The project lead is automatically a member of all slices created in a project.

The following figure shows two slices created by the research assistant in Project Alpha. She has added to Slice 1 three compute resources connected by three network links. She has also added the post-doc associated with her project as a member of her slice. Her professor was automatically added to her slice as he is the project lead. Slice 2 has two compute resources connected by a link. She has not added the post-doc as a member of this slice and so he cannot perform any actions on this slice or even view the resources in this slice. Only the research assistant or her professor can add the post-doc to this slice.

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