GENI Desktop Project Status Report

Period: Post GEC 21 Report

I. Major accomplishments

The following highlights our accomplishments during the last reporting period.

A. Milestones achieved

• Modified the GENI Desktop to support "Speaks-for" authentication being developed/supported by the control frameworks and other GENI tools/services.

• Incorporated user-driven feedback into the GENI Desktop to support user-requested services and features.

• Developed new training materials that incorporate the changes made to the GENI Desktop.

• Demonstrated "Speaks-for" and super slice support capabilities at GEC21.

B. Deliverables made

• We enhanced the GENI Desktop to use "Speaks-for" credentials for accessing resources from other GENI components on behalf of users.

• We improved the user interface based on feedback from last GEC.

• We implemented an initial version of the slice verification and configuration testing service.

• We developed code for super slice support in the GENI Desktop.

II. Description of work performed during last quarter

The following provides a description of the progress made during the last reporting period.

A. Activities and findings

Our activities this last reporting period have been primarily focused on developing code for supporting "Speaks-for" authentication, implementing an initial version of the slice verification and configuration testing service, and desinging "super slice" functionality. We also made various enhancements to the GENI Desktop's user interface based on feedback from users.

The "Speaks-for" credential allows trusted tools to act for, instead of acting as, an experimenter to perform certain actions, such as requesting resources from aggregates, accessing allocated resources, and installing software on experimental nodes. We enhanced the GENI Desktop to use "Speaks-for" credentials for accessing resources on behalf of users. Users no longer need to provide the private key to the GENI Desktop. We implemented an interface for the user to authorize the GENI Desktop to speak for her/him. A GENI Desktop-specific certificate is signed using the private key of the user. Because the whole process happens within the browser on the client side, the private key never leaves the user's machine. The "Speaks-for" credential allows the GENI Desktop to talk to aggregates and perform all necessary actions on behalf of the user.

We implemented the slice verification and configuration testing service as a module in GENI Desktop by taking advantage of the module builder function of the GENI Desktop. Based on the manifest of an experiment, the verification service analyzes the topology and performs tests about the interfaces of all nodes in the experiment. The initial version we implemented checks whether each interface is up and whether it is reachable from a ping test. The states are presented in a table showing the status of all the interfaces of all the nodes in the experiment.

Building a large experiment is a difficult task in GENI, partly because it is more likely to fail if we create an experiment with a lot of nodes. At the same time, we may have multiple related experiments and want to combine these relatively small experiments together to form a large experiment. We developed a new "super slice" service in the GENI Desktop to support this functionality. Users can use the GENI Desktop to create a super slice by combining multiple existing slices together. The GENI Desktop provides a GUI for users to display multiple slices at the same time and pick any pair of nodes from different slices to establish a link between them. The Super Slice service in the GENI Desktop currently can then automatically set up GRE tunnels between these selected pairs of nodes from different slices.

Finally, we demonstrated these new features of the GENI Desktop at GEC 21. The figure above shows three different slices are displayed and a pair of nodes are selected. The super slice function will create a GRE tunnel between these pair of nodes.

B. Project participants

The following individuals are involved with the project in one way or another:

• Jim Griffioen - Project PI
• Zongming Fei - Project Co-PI
• Hussamuddin Nasir - Technician/Programmer
• Charles Carpenter - Technician/Programmer
• Xiongqi Wu - Ph.D. Student
• Jeremy Reed - Ph.D. Student

C. Publications (individual and organizational)

D. Outreach activities

• We presented during the demo session at GEC 21 showing the newly implemented functions of the GENI Desktop.

E. Collaborations

• Most of our collaborations have been between the GPO Portal team, the Indiana GEMINI team and the Utah team.

F. Other Contributions