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. |
| 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/ (Despite the name, this is a production GMOC web interface with a number of options for searching and displaying data). In addition, the GMOC offers an API which anyone can use to download raw GMOC-collected data to analyze, graph, etc. The GPO used this API to create some useful Plastic Slices 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. |
146 | | We ran five experiments on these slices, to send various kinds of artificial but representative traffic across the network: ping for ICMP, netcat for unencrypted TCP, wget (HTTPS) for encrypted TCP, and iperf for TCP and UDP with some performance statistics. We picked these because they were simple and widely available, but still provided some variety, and are similar to the types of traffic that we expect to be used by real mesoscale GENI experiments. (Note that although ping and iperf both give you performance statistics, we weren't specifically trying to measure network performance, as this wasn't one of the goals of the project.) |
147 | | |
148 | | http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/PlasticSlices/Experiments has more details about the experiments in general, and the baseline pages (see below) have more details about the exact paramemters used for each experiment in each baseline. |
| 146 | We ran five experiments on these slices, to send various kinds of artificial but representative traffic across the network: ping for ICMP, netcat for unencrypted TCP, wget (HTTPS) for encrypted TCP, and iperf for TCP and UDP with some performance statistics. We picked these because they were simple and widely available, but still provided some variety, and are similar to the types of traffic that we expect to be used by real meso-scale GENI experiments. (Note that although ping and iperf both give you performance statistics, we weren't specifically trying to measure network performance, as this wasn't one of the goals of the project.) |
| 147 | |
| 148 | http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/PlasticSlices/Experiments has more details about the experiments in general, and the baseline pages (see below) have more details about the exact parameters used for each experiment in each baseline. |
204 | | Packet loss is generally not desirable, but it highlights the fact that OpenFlow allows you to control traffic in GENI in ways that aren't possible in a regular network. Using OpenFlow doesn't require packet loss, of course: For example, we could have used a smarter (experiment-specific) controller that added flowtable rules to the switches before we even began sending traffic. Or, if we didn't want to use a more complicated controller for other reasons, we could have sent some seed traffic to cause the simplistic controller to create the flows, before we began sending the traffic that we actually cared about. OpenFlow in GENI gives you a great deal of flexibilty. |
| 204 | Packet loss is generally not desirable, but it highlights the fact that OpenFlow allows you to control traffic in GENI in ways that aren't possible in a regular network. Using OpenFlow doesn't require packet loss, of course: For example, we could have used a smarter (experiment-specific) controller that added flowtable rules to the switches before we even began sending traffic. Or, if we didn't want to use a more complicated controller for other reasons, we could have sent some seed traffic to cause the simplistic controller to create the flows, before we began sending the traffic that we actually measured. OpenFlow in GENI gives you a great deal of flexibility. |
252 | | This report concludes the formal part of the Plastic Slices project, but we plan to continue using the mesoscale infrastructure to run experiments and tests. We'll publish our plans, and our results, on the GENI wiki. We intend to keep data flowing continuously for the next few months, to allow us to continue to develop and test monitoring, operational procedures and practices, etc. We intend to switch to running experiments that are less artificial, and dig deeper into some of the things that we didn't have time to complete. |
| 252 | This report concludes the formal part of the Plastic Slices project, but we plan to continue using the meso-scale infrastructure to run experiments and tests. We'll publish additional plans and results on the GENI wiki. We intend to keep data flowing continuously for the next few months, to allow us to continue to develop and test monitoring, operational procedures and practices and to integrate new software and hardware. We intend to involve actual experimenters in future work, and to investigate some of the initial Plastic Slices results in more detail. |