wiki:Raven4Q10QSR

Raven Quarterly Status Report for Q4 2009

Reporting period: Oct 1 - Dec 31 2009

PI: John H. Hartman (University of Arizona)

Major accomplishments

  • Released raven tool for one-step software installation
  • Developed ravenbuilder tool for one-step RPM creation
  • Improved Owl, a service for monitoring slice health
  • Deployed Stork repository as a VM backed up by Amazon S3

Description of work performed during last quarter

Activities and findings

We developed and released raven, a tool for one-step software installation. Raven greatly simplifies the process of deploying software packages on a slice. Raven creates a template directory tree that the user populates with the proper GENI key and software packages. Raven takes care of the rest, creating and signing the proper tpfiles and tempest files, and uploads these files to the Stork repository along with the packages. At that point Stork will install these packages on all nodes in the specified slice.

We prototyped ravenbuilder, a tool in the Raven suite that will automatically create RPM packages. This tool integrates with the raven tool so that the user can populate the template directory tree with the files that constitute their package, and the combination of ravenbuilder and raven will create an RPM package from those files and deploy the package in their slice.

We deployed the Raven tools on the GpENI testbed, allowing a single Raven experiment to span slices in both the PlanetLab and GpENI testbeds.

We continued to develop Owl, a service for monitoring slice health. Owl consists of an extensible set of client-side plugins that collect information about software running in the slice. This information is sent to a centralized Owl server that stores the information in a database. The Owl server makes this information available via Web pages as well as in XML and JSON format. We added a map feature to Owl that displays slices as pins on a Google map, and the color of the pins displays (user-configurable) information about the health of the slice. We demoed Owl at GEC6.

We participated in a meeting (prior to GEC6) and on-line discussions on unifying the GID representations between the PlanetLab and ProtoGENI clusters.

We continue to work on iftd, a data transfer daemon that will allow Stork clients to access files via a variety of transport protocols such as http, ftp, BitTorrent, and CoDeploy. Protocol handling and error handling are encapsulated in the iftd daemon, freeing individual Raven tools from having to perform these functions. We anticipate deploying iftd in the next quarter and it will eventually replace the arizona_transfer module the Raven tools currently use.

Project participants

  • John H. Hartman (University of Arizona)
  • Scott Baker (SB Software)
  • Jude Nelson (University of Arizona)

Publications (individual and organizational)

  • None.

Outreach activities

  • None.

Collaborations

We worked closely with the following Cluster B members:

  • PlanetLab
  • GUSH
  • GpENI

We are also working with the ProtoGENI cluster to port Raven to their infrastructure. Most of this effort focuses on unifying the GID representations.

Other Contributions

  • None.
Last modified 14 years ago Last modified on 04/13/10 17:43:08