Welcome to GENI. This page will guide you through your first GENI experiment. The only thing you will need is a GENI account. If you don't already have one, sign up!?

1. Configure your GENI account

For our first experiment we are going to use ​Flack a web-based graphical tool for reserving GENI resources. Your first step is to log in to Flack. ​This video will guide you through the steps of logging in.

Go to http://www.protogeni.net/flack and press the Log in button From the select authority drop down menu, select the site authority for your GENI account, most probably pgeni.gpolab.bbn.com and press the Download button Answer yes in the pop-up window Login to the new window using your GENI account Reload the Flack tab and repeat steps 1 and 2 After your private key and certificate are loaded, type your GENI passphrase in the box Select the sites you want. For this tutorial we only need the utaemulab.cm site.

2. Launch your experiment

Now that you are logged in to Flack, we are ready to design our experiment. ​This video will guide you through the process of setting up the resources for the Hello GENI experiment. To complete the setup you will need to save a copy of this file on your computer. This is a Resource Specification (rspec) file that contains a description of this experiment for Flack.

After Flack finishes loading all the information, create a new slice by clicking New on the left of the screen, right under your user name. Name your slice something like xxxhello (where xxx are your initials) When an empty canvas shows up, you are ready to create an experiment. Click at the Import button on the top of the canvas and select Import from file Find the copy of this rspec file that you downloaded earlier and press ok A topology will come up, it will look different than the topology on the video. Your topology should look like . Press the Submit button and confirm that you want to reserve these resources. Wait while your resources are being reserved. This will take several minutes so be patient. When your sliver is ready the background will be green.

3. View your results

For this example experiment we used the install script facility to automatically install the necessary software and kick-off the experiment. In this very simple setup, we have installed and launched a ​web server as well as an ​iperf server, on the server host. On the client, we have started some processes to test both of these services. To view the results of this experiment:

After the background of your slice turns green, press the (i) button that is on the server node icon. In the information tab that came up, press the Visit button. A new tab should come up that looks like the picture on the side. Click the webserver statistics link to look at statistics. Refresh the page a couple of times to see how the statistics change as the client requests documents. Click the iperf logs link to see the statistics from the iperf transfers.

5. Optional: Manually generate traffic While conducting experiments in GENI, you will often want to run commands directly on the nodes. In this optional step, you will log in to a node and issue commands directly to it.
   • Follow these instructions and log in to the client node
   • When you have successfully logged in, run this command

     iperf -c server -P 2
     

     This task shouldn't take more than 30 seconds. Change the number after the -P argument and watch how the performance is affected while you change the number of parallel TCP connections.
   • Scroll all the way down the server iperf log, and look at the logs for your transfers

4. Cleanup

After you are done with your experiment, you should always release your resources so that other experimenters can use the resources. As shown at the end of the ​video for reserving resources, in order to cleanup your slice :

1. Press at the Delete button in the bottom of your canvas
2. select to delete it at used managers only and confirm your selection.

Wait and after a few moments all the resources will have been released and you will have an empty canvas again. Notice that your slice is still there. There is no way to delete a slice, it will be removed automatically after its expiration date, but remember that a slice is just an empty container so it doesn't take up any resources.

5. What's next?

Congratulations! You have finished your first GENI Experiment. Now that you are more familiar with GENI concepts you can:

• continue with more advanced tutorials?
• learn more about how to use Flack by following the ​Flack Tutorial
• start with your own experiment. This tutorial showed you the basic steps for running an experiment. Use Flack to create your own topology, take a look at the instructions about how to write your own install scripts to automate your expriment.