| 11 | | The Plastic Slices project was the first project in the Meso-Scale Campus Experiments plan, for evolving meso-scale experiments between now and GEC 12. The overarching purpose was to set shared campus goals, and to agree on a schedule and resources to support experiments. This first project was an effort to run ten (or more) GENI slices continuously for multiple months -- not merely for the sake of having ten slices running, but to gain experience managing and operating production-quality GENI resources. |
| 12 | | |
| 13 | | During Spiral 3, campuses have been expanding and updating their OpenFlow deployments. All campuses have agreed to run a GENI AM API compliant aggregate manager, and to support at least four multi-site GENI experiments, by GEC 12. This lays the foundation for GENI to continuously support and manage multiple simultaneous slices that contain resources from GENI AM API compliant aggregates with multiple cross-country layer 2 data paths. (http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GeniApi has more information about what it means to be a "GENI AM API compliant aggregate.") This campus infrastructure can support the transition from building GENI to using GENI continuously in the meso-scale infrastructure. Longer-term, it can also support the transition to at-scale production use in 2012, as originally proposed by each campus. |
| | 11 | The Plastic Slices project in the GENI meso-scale infrastructure was created to set shared campus goals for evolving GENI's infrastructure and to agree on a schedule and resources to support GENI experiments. This first project was an effort to run ten (or more) GENI slices continuously for multiple months -- not merely for the sake of having ten slices running, but to gain experience managing and operating production-quality GENI resources. |
| | 12 | |
| | 13 | During Spiral 3, campuses expanded and updated their OpenFlow deployments. All campuses agreed to run a GENI AM API compliant aggregate manager, and to support at least four multi-site GENI experiments by GEC 12 (November, 2011). This laid the foundation for GENI to continuously support and manage multiple simultaneous slices that contain resources from GENI AM API compliant aggregates with multiple cross-country layer 2 data paths. (http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GeniApi has more information about what it means to be a "GENI AM API compliant aggregate.") This campus infrastructure can support the transition from building GENI to using GENI continuously in the meso-scale infrastructure. Longer-term, it can also support the transition to at-scale production use in 2012, as originally proposed by each campus. |
| 19 | | A high-level goal of this project was to run ten GENI slices continuously over a period of several months. This wasn't just an end in itself, though, but rather a means for us to accomplish two other objectives. |
| 20 | | |
| 21 | | First, we wanted to gain experience managing and operating production-quality meso |
| | 19 | A high-level goal of this project was to run ten GENI slices continuously over a period of several months. This wasn't just an end in itself, but rather a means for us to accomplish two other objectives. |
| | 20 | |
| | 21 | First, we wanted to gain experience managing and operating production-quality meso-scale GENI resources, at various levels: |
| 66 | | Is meso |
| 67 | | |
| 68 | | Much of the software that we rely upon is still new, and at an early stage of its life cycle. This is unavoidable to some extent, and improves with time. Similarly, GENI may be the first large-scale deployment for some software, whether for the software as a whole, or for new versions as they come out. It may be difficult for a developer to test their software adequately in their development environment, which is unlikely to be as large, geographically diverse, and otherwise heterogeneous, as the whole of GENI. |
| | 66 | Is meso-scale GENI software ready to use in a production-quality environment? We concluded that it is, but again with some caveats. |
| | 67 | |
| | 68 | Much of the software we rely on is still new, and at an early stage of its life cycle. This is unavoidable to some extent, and improves with time. Similarly, GENI may be the first large-scale deployment for some software, whether for the software as a whole, or for new versions as they come out. It may be difficult for a developer to test their software adequately in their development environment, which is unlikely to be as large, geographically diverse, and otherwise heterogeneous, as the whole of GENI. |
| 104 | | Is meso |
| 105 | | |
| 106 | | Getting started, and doing very simple things, is in fact fairly easy: There are few barriers to entry, and they're generally low. However, experimenter tools to enable more sophisticated experiments are only just now interoperating with GENI -- although this is improving rapidly, and in fact improved over the course of the project. There are also specific usability concerns with OpenFlow, where the Expedient Opt-In Manager requires manual approval from an operator at every OpenFlow aggregate, whenever any OpenFlow resource is allocated; this can be daunting to new experimenters, and even for experienced folks, the need for manual approval can cause significant delays. |
| 107 | | |
| 108 | | This is another area where work is already active within GENI (most of the Experimenter track at GEC 11 focused on tools), but we again have some ideas for additional improvements: |
| | 104 | Is meso-scale GENI easy for experimenters to use? We found that it is in some ways, but not in others. |
| | 105 | |
| | 106 | Getting started and doing very simple things is in fact fairly easy: There are few barriers to entry, and they're generally low. However, experimenter tools to enable more sophisticated experiments are only just now interoperating with GENI -- although this is improving rapidly, and in fact improved over the course of the project. There are also specific usability concerns with OpenFlow, where the Expedient Opt-In Manager requires manual approval from an operator at every OpenFlow aggregate, whenever any OpenFlow resource is allocated. This can be daunting to new experimenters, and can cause significant delays for anyone. |
| | 107 | |
| | 108 | Usability is another area where work is already active in GENI (most of the Experimenter track at GEC 11 focused on tools), but we again have some ideas for additional improvements: |
| 132 | | (Graphs of bytes sent (TX) and bytes received (TX) during Baseline 5.) |
| 133 | | |
| 134 | | During the project, all mesoscale campuses were configured to send monitoring data to the GMOC. We found that sites had resources that didn't use NTP, which was essential for correlating data between sites. The GMOC offers an interface called SNAPP for browising the data that they collect, visible at http://gmoc-db.grnoc.iu.edu/api-demo/. In addition, the GMOC offers an API which anyone can use to download the raw data that they collect, analyze it, graph it, etc, which we used to create some local graphs that we found useful. They collect data of interest to both operators and experimenters, at various levels of granularity, and can create some per-slice information, although this relies on naming conventions to tie together slices and slivers. |
| 135 | | |
| 136 | | http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/PlasticSlices/MonitoringRecommendations has links |
| | 132 | (Graphs of bytes sent (first graph TX) and bytes received (second graph RX) in each slice during Baseline 5.) |
| | 133 | |
| | 134 | During the project, all mesoscale campuses were configured to send monitoring data to the GMOC. Some sites initially configured resources that didn't use NTP, but revised the configurations after starting monitoring, because NTP is essential for correlating data between sites. The GMOC offers an interface called SNAPP for browsing the data that they collect, visible at http://gmoc-db.grnoc.iu.edu/api-demo/. In addition, the GMOC offers an API which anyone can use to download raw collected data from GMOC to analyze it, graph it, etc. The GPO used this API to create useful local monitoring graphs (samples included in this report, and more available through the GENI wiki). The GPO data is of interest to both operators and experimenters, covers various levels of granularity, and presents some per-slice information. The per-slice information relies on naming conventions to tie together slices and slivers in this implementation. |
| | 135 | |
| | 136 | http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/PlasticSlices/MonitoringRecommendations has links to a variety of monitoring sites and information. |
