= ORCA-BEN/ORCA-AUG QSR 2010-12-8 =

== Overview ==

This QSR combines reports for the original ORCABEN project (1528) as well as the ORCAAUG Augmentation project (1700), initiated 10/1/2009. Consistent with the GPO nomenclature, project milestones below are prepended with project names ORCABEN and ORCAAUG, respectively.

During the last quarter the team has continued improving the codebase and adding new features to ORCA:
  * Restructuring and cleaning out of the codebase
    * Completed development of ORCA XMLRPC that is close to the GENI AM API definition. Demonstrated at GEC9. The GPO (Tom Mitchell) has been making patches and recommendations for the code to become more compliant with GENI AM API 1.0.
  * New NDL-handling capabilities:
    * Extended the NDL-OWL definitions to cover new Eucalyptus capabilities including node address assignment and site topology embedding
    * IContinued refining Emulab NS2 to NDL-OWL converter, now capable of accepting topologies consisting of point-to-point links and VLANs (available at http://geni-test.renci.org:11080/ndl-conversion/convert.jsp)
  * Adding new substrate driver capabilities
    * Restructured and simplified network driver codebase by removing Node Agent code and allowing sites directly invoke handler actions
    * Made network driver actions more finely granular to allow better policy controls
    * Improved Eucalyptus handler
    * Developed new Juniper EX3200 driver
    * Modified NLR Sherpa driver to match the newly released Sherpa API
    * !OpenFlow handler capable of creating guest configurations by ORCA
  * Added more substrate
    * Installed and deployed a Eucalyptus 1.6.x cluster at the BEN@UNC PoP and installed two Eucalyptus clusters at Duke CS
  * Operations
    * Communicated the details of the XMLRPC actor registry interface to GMOC for integration
  * Experimentation
    * Facilitated an experiment for UNC CS faculty by allowing to run traffic from UNC CS lab in loopback first through BEN and then, with assistance from NLR NOC, through BEN and NLR across country
  
We continued working with Cluster-D projects to help them integrate the new features of the Bella 2.0 release done in the previous quarter. This included documenting the new substrate API, best practices documents, network driver development HOWTO and answering direct questions from Cluster-D developers.

== Project Participants ==

  * Ilia Baldine PI, RENCI
  * Jeff Chase PI, Duke University
  * Yufeng Xin (NDL-OWL development, inter-domain path finding), Anirban Mandal (actor registry, XMLRPC controller, policy development), Aydan Yumerefendi (codebase maintenance, documentation) – core development team, RENCI
  * Prateek Jaipuria, Duke University
  * Chris Heermann – BEN Operations, RENCI
  * Namgon Kim (!OpenFlow handler, authority, OF experiment controller) (GIST, Korea, visiting scholar at RENCI)