wiki:ShadowNet-Report-August-2011

Version 1 (modified by griff@netlab.uky.edu, 13 years ago) (diff)

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GENI Shadownet Project Status Report

Period: Post GEC 11 Report

I. Major accomplishments

The following highlights our accomplishments during the last reporting period.

A. Milestones achieved

During the last reporting period we achieved the following milestones:

  • (milestone s3.c) We took a major step toward making Juniper routers accessible to GENI users by integrating our Shadownet Component Manager into the ProtoGENI control framework so that the logical routers on the Juniper will appear as resourses available for users to use. Our next step is to integrate our instrumentation tools with the Juniper routers so that monitoring/measurement data collection is setup automatically -- in our previous demos this was a manual process.
  • (milestone s3.d) We updated our Shadownet web pages with information about the system and support contacts for the Shadownet Aggregate.
  • (milestone s3.e) We have an initial design and implementation of our software that works in conjunction with the perfSONAR tools.

B. Deliverables made

  • Routers have been installed and are being operated in all four Shadownet locations: Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Washington DC, and Atlanta.

II. Description of work performed during last quarter

The following provides a description of the progress made during the last reporting period.

A. Activities and findings

Our work this past quarter focused on the problem of integrating Shadownet into the ProtoGENI network with the intent of making the GENI Shadownet resources available via the ProtoGENI interfaces and APIs. Starting with the standalone GENI Shadownet CM (component manager) that we developed earlier, we made modifications in order to integrate it into the ProtoGENI architecture, enabling it to accept ProtoGENI credentials and interact with ProtoGENI users via the standard ProtoGENI API calls. We developed our initial version of the system in a test environment in order to evaluate our design and implementation. Recently, we moved our GENI Shadownet CM from the test environment to the production ProtoGENI network. We have now integrated our CM with the ProtoGENI Clearinghouse which means that all the resources advertised by our component manager automatically become visible to GENI users and can be allocated by them into their slices. For example, users of the ProtoGENI FLACK client are now able to see the Shadownet CM and any resources that it has been configured to advertise.

One of the key issues we have been working through is the issue of how to connect the Juniper's logical router interfaces to other ProtoGENI routers and end systems (say nodes at Kentucky or Utah). Because these resources are often managed by other CMs, connecting to these resources involves "stitching" together resources from the Shadownet CM with end system nodes advertised by, say, the Utah or Kentucky CMs. While there has been siginificant progress this past year in regards to stitching in GENI, it is still a work in progress with several limitations. Given the fact that stitching is not yet mature, we have begun to look at other options for connecting our logical routers to other GENI resources. We are currently exploring a solution based on GRE tunnels since GRE tunnels represent a "least common denominator" across a wide range of GENI resources. Ideally, one would like each logical router to have its own unique, routable, IP address. However, as of this writing, we do not have enough IP addresses to give away to logical routers. Consequently, we have been looking into ways to run GRE tunnels over a single shared IP address used by the physical router. We have had some success doing this in a test environment, but are still working on getting this working in the more general ProtoGENI environment. In the meantime, we have initiated discussions with our colleagues at Internet 2 about obtaining additional IP addresses which would greatly help, and we continue to be involved in the stitching discussions.

We also made significant enhancements to our GENI Monitoring Portal (GMP) interface and integrated the portal interface with the ProtoGENI FLACK graphical user interface so that users can get directly to the portal from the FLACK interface. The portal shows the location of the resources that comprise a slice on a map and provides a link for users to immediately view measurement data being gathered at nodes and links as well as providing a link that will take the user to the measurement controller associated with a set of resources. Part of our enhancements have focused on redesigning the portal to be able to interact with the measurement controllers for the shadownet logical routers. Our current plan is to allocate multiple measurement controllers, one for each of the shadownet routers to be monitored. This differs from the single MC per aggregate approach we have used to-date, but enables us to localize data communication so that it does not leave the Internet 2 backbone until the user requests that it be archived. We also modified our portal server to support both RSPEC v1 and v2 specifications, extracting and displaying the topology information embedded in these RSPECs. We also added the ability to view the topology/resources at various zoom levels, making it easier for users to get at the data they wish to observe.

During this time, we also continued to support and operate the Juniper routers in the Internet 2 backbone, and have been using the routers in our testing and evaluation of the new Shadownet CM.

Finally, we continue to have discussions with the PerfSONAR team to better understand how we can more tightly integrate the data collection from our logical routers with PerfSONAR.

B. Project participants

The following individuals are involved with the project in one way or another:

  • Jim Griffioen - Project PI (Kentucky)
  • Zongming Fei - Project Co-PI (Kentucky)
  • Kobus van der Merwe - Project Co-PI (AT\&T)
  • Eric Boyd - Subcontract Lead (Internet2)
  • Brian Cashman - Network Planning Manager (Internet2)
  • Lowell Pike - Network administrator (Kentucky)
  • Hussamuddin Nasir - Technician/Programmer (Kentucky)
  • Charles Carpenter - Researcher/Programmer (Kentucky)
  • Emmanouil Mavrogiorgis - Research Staff (AT\&T)

C. Publications (individual and organizational)

D. Outreach activities

E. Collaborations

Most of our collaborations have been with the Shadownet team. In particular, it involves participants from Kentucky, AT\&T, and Internet2, but we have also had several conversations with our ProtoGENI and perfSONAR colleagues.

F. Other Contributions