wiki:LEARN-2Q11-status

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LEARN Project Status Report

Period: April 1, 2011 - June 30, 2011

I. Major accomplishments

This project involves collaboration with GENI project; ORCA-BEN for integration with LEARN [LEARN_1]. This project integrates with ORCA in Cluster D with extensibility considerations towards integration with any cluster in the future.

With respect to the ORCA-BEN integration with LEARN: We have successful installed and deployed an ORCA instance at our lab, ISSNet. Cisco 3400 switches have been purchased and deployed to 5 sites across Texas: Rice, UH, TAMU, UT, and LEARN Houston PoP. We demonstrated the connectivity between the deployed switches across the sites using VLAN translations on the core switch (LEARN 3400) during GEC10, March 2011. The deployment initiated interest to have end point resources at these sites for GENI researchers to connect to using the ORCA control framework.

A Eucalyptus cluster is being deployed at the University of Houston. Purchase specifications have been determined in collaboration with the ORCA team (Jeff Chase and Ilia Baldine). A rack space and support team have been established at the University of Houston’s Research and Computing Center (Keith Crabb).

A. Milestones achieved

Milestone LEARN: S3.d Demonstration at GEC10 and Experimenter Outreach Capabilities to be demonstrated include complete deployment of a Cisco switch (Cisco 3400) and a small Eucalyptus cluster (at UH and Rice): Univ Houston, Rice Univ, Texas A&M Univ, and UT-Auston, all assigned and controlled by the site authorities at Univ Houston.

Participate in defining a plan for naming and stitching L2 connectivity across Cluster D.

Milestone LEARN: S3.e Documentation and Code Release

Milestone LEARN: S3.f Demonstration at GEC11 and Experimenter Outreach

Operate the ORCA instance at Univ Houston to provide Eucalyptus cluster resources and connectivity, on any of the four campuses, on demand, to GENI experimenters.

Provide operational support, and export operational status to the GMOC

Implement the GENI AM API, and authenticate users via InCommon/Shibboleth? identity providers, when these capabilities are provided by enhanced ORCA code

At this time, one Eucalyptus cluster is in progress to be built at the University of Houston site. Another one is being planned for the Rice University site. Rice cluster will be determined once a rack space and a contact person has been designated from the Rice Computation Center.

B. Deliverables made

Milestone LEARN: S3.e: Documented all the points discussed with GPO about the enhancements that were made on this project (GEC10)

In progress: Milestone LEARN: S3.d part 2: deployment of clusters at UH and Rice.

II. Description of work performed during last quarter

Discussed about ORCA-ION handlers possible extension and added flexibility of connections to other GENI infrastructure. As a part of Performance measurements perfSONAR implementation is in progress on LEARN.

Capabilities to be demonstrated include complete deployment of small Eucalyptus cluster (at UH and Rice Universities), all assigned and controlled by the site authorities at University of Houston and participate in defining a plan for naming and stitching L2 connectivity across Cluster D.

Documented all the enhancements made in this project from GEC-10 which also includes the explanation of concepts/technology associated with the implementation.

Building of Eucalyptus cluster has been in progress since GEC10 in the form of experimentation with it in the research lab. The purchase order has been placed on the hardware (one worker and one head node) on June 23rd.

A. Activities and findings

Eucalyptus cluster implementation is in progress.

A collaboration initiative has been started between LEARN and IMF to include IMF’s perfSONAR modules on LEARN to monitor physical layer measurements. LEARN has shown interest. However, a deployment plan will be worked on to have a pilot trial on dark fiber and then a deployment on LEARN production network. This collaboration has been initiated by the IMF team, Ilia Baldine and Rudra Dutta. The discussion started during the LEARN workshop organized on February 18th, 2011 at the University of Houston.

B. Project participants

PI: Deniz Gurkan, University of Houston, Texas, dgurkan@uh.edu

Senior Personnel: Charles Chambers, University of Houston, Texas, cchambers@uh.edu

Graduate Student: Karthik Ram

C. Publications (individual and organizational)

None.

D. Outreach activities

Dr. Gurkan has attended and presented at the LEARN quarterly Technical Advisory Group meeting in Dallas on June 16th, 2011. She is the TAG representative to LEARN from University of Houston. She requested to continue integration efforts with LEARN and extend them to include IMF perfSONAR monitoring mechanisms.

Dr. Gurkan started collaborating with Infoblox Inc. on a project to do a feasibility study of usage of IF-MAP as a mechanism to access, control, and configure measurements in the optical layer. Other approaches will be compared (such as RSpec) in the GENI community and a pilot demonstration will be performed next year May to show the capabilities of IF-MAP to the GENI community.

E. Collaborations

Cluster D: Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and Duke University: Ilia Baldine, Yufeng Xin, Jeff Chase, and Varun Marupadi. Ilia Baldine provides us the tools to become ORCA users on BEN with remote access through VPN.

GPO: Harry Mussman. We closely worked with Harry Mussman to create an updated version of the GENI Wikipage and to submit milestone reports and quarterly status reports. Discussions via e-mail on the design and planning of LEARN VLAN delivery to the GENI infrastructure were conducted.

LEARN of Texas: Akbar Kara, CTO of LEARN and Charles Chambers, University of Houston

F. Other Contributions

None.