GENI / FIRE Collaboration Workshop, September 2015, Session 1: Reports and discussions of funded collaborations

Session chairs

• Per Blixt
• Jack Brassil

Session Summary

This opening session focused its attention on a series of specific research collaborations between US and EU researchers, funded under a GENI SAVI grant and FIRE projects, respectively. Six teams reported results and discussed future plans. During the session, a recurring theme of federation came to the fore. Researchers from FIRE projects and GENI are pursuing federation through multiple mechanisms. Specific presentations discussed the following.

• Shared, open-source software components for key capabilities (e.g., as described in David Margery and Marshall Brinn's report on collaboration via the geni-tools open source project and Robert Ricci and Brecht Vermeulen's report on federated monitoring.)

• Architectural measures that facilitate federation. Examples addressed both the control plane (e.g., Ilya Baldin & Chrysa Pappagiani's discussion of brokers) and the data plans (e.g., KC Wang and Jerry Sobieski's presentations on implementation of OpenFlow proxies and GTS).

Note that Bartek Belter's presentation on FELIX (an EU/Japan testbed collaboration), presented later in the federation session, showed a federation strategy that is very much in the same spirit and drew on several of the same elements.

Discussion during the presentations identified potential opportunities for opportunistic collaborations. For example, two GENI components, GENI Desktop and the GENI portal, are investigating incorporating simplified status information using a similar or identical approach to that described by Robert Ricci and Brecht Vermeulen.

Two additional presentations covered different topics. Ingrid Moerman presented joint work with Violet Syrotiuk, which applies locating arrays to reduce by many orders of magnitude the search space for wireless parameter optimization. Brecht Vermeulen presented a report on the recent FGRE summer school, which cross-trained researchers on GENI and Fed4FIRE.

The session concluded with a question from chairs Per Blixt and Jack Brassil, who asked participants to identify characteristics leading to successful trans-Atlantic research collaborations. There was wide agreement that face-to-face interactions are very important, and several people commented on the benefits of spending several days or weeks at a collaborator's institution in order to jump start joint research projects.

Presentations

Author(s)	Title	Presentation
Ilya Baldin & Chrysa Pappagiani	Resource Management and Topology Embedding in Distributed Networked Infrastructure Environments	slides​
Rob Ricci & Brecht Vermeulen	Health and Availability Service for User Tools	slides​
David Margery & Marshall Brinn	Collaboration on GENI Control Framework (aggregate manager)	slides​
Brecht Vermeulen & Kaiqi Xiong	FGRE Summerschool 2015	slides​
Violet Syrotiuk & Ingrid Moerman	Wi-Fi Conferencing System: Locating Array	slides​
KC Wang, Jerry Sobieski, & Paul Mueller	From GTS to CloudLab: on OpenFlow, NSI, and GTS-GENI Federation	slides​