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GENI Shadownet Project Status Report
Period: Post GEC 14 Report
I. Major accomplishments
The following highlights our accomplishments during the last reporting period.
A. Milestones achieved
- Milestone S4.c) Interoperate with the perfSONAR model. We completed the integration of our instrumentation tools (INSTOOLS) with the perfSONAR model supported in the LAMP/periscope project.
- Milestone S4.d) Support user access to the Juniper resources and archive services to the GMOC. We continued to support user access to the Juniper resources and updated and improved our support for sharing of monitoring information with the GMOC through INSTOOLS.
B. Deliverables made
- The Shadownet CM code now supports the AM API and can partially support stitching for Juniper logical routers with the nodes from the Utah aggregate.
- We updated and enhanced the INSTOOLS code that provides sharing of measurement data with the GMOC archival service.
- We developed a prototype of the GENI One-Stop portal to provide access to all aspects of GENI.
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 activities this last reporting period have been primarily focused on adding support for the AM API, incorporating early stitching efforts into Shadownet, developing a one-stop portal prototype, and interoperating with the LAMP/Periscope project as well as the GMOC archival services.
To provide AM API support, we again started with the latest version of the reference CM which was rewritten to support the latest version of the RSPEC (versions 2 and 3) and added support for the AM API. Using this as our starting point, we re-wrote the code for the Shadownet component manager to work with these new APIs and RSPECS. As a result, the Shadownet CM can now accept credentials from other control frameworks and fully supports the AM API calls.
In the demos of previous GECs, we created a topology with Juniper routers and PCs from Utah and Kentucky aggregates. However, the links between Juniper routers and PCs had to be added manually because of the lack of stitching support. Working with the ProtoGENI group, we added code that enables us to provide stitching support for Utah aggregate nodes that have VLAN connectivity to the ProtoGENI backbone switches co-located with logical Juniper routers from the Shadownet aggregate. In our most recent GEC 14 demo, we created a topology that included both PCs from the Utah aggregate and logical Juniper routers from Shadownet. To accomplish this, we first set up an experiment with PCs from the Utah aggregate and let these PCs connect to special devices to create the VLAN connectivity. We then created a topology consisting of logical routers and let each logical router connect to the respective VLAN using the VLAN number obtained in the previous step. VLANs were automatically created between the PCs and the logical routers because of the newly added stitching support.
A relatively new focus this past reporting period has been on designing a new way for users to interact with their GENI experiments. In particular, we started to build a prototype of what we call the GENI one-stop portal (GENI OS Portal). The goal of the GENI OS Portal is to provide users with a single unified interface to the tools in GENI. It is built around the concept of a slice and the topology represented by a slice -- i.e. the key abstraction that all GENI tools share in common. The portal can accommodate various GENI tools as plugins to the portal. Each plugin extends the set of operations that can be carried out on slice resources. As plugins are enabled, the set of operations allowed on the resources continues to expand. All (plugin) operations are accessed via the portal's common topology-based interfaces, regardless of the type of operation being performed. As a result, the portal is able to provide access to all aspects of GENI including slice creation, access to slice resources (e.g., ssh), file management, experiment execution, instrumentation, measurement and monitoring, archiving of experiment data, etc, all via tool-specific plugins.
While our INSTOOLs code has supported archival service to the GMOC for quite some time, recent changes to the APIs, and in particular the RSPECs, required us to update and enhance our code needed to archive and share measurement data with the GMOC services. The archival service is a "live" service in the sense that data is collected and streamed live to the GMOC archives. The collected measurement data is first transformed into a GMOC-specific format and then sent to the GMOC site for storage. The user specifies when to start collecting data, and the measurement data is then continuously transformed and sent to the GMOC server. The user can stop the process at any time.
Another major focus this past reporting period has been on integration with the LAMP/Periscope project, incorporating the perfSONAR model used in LAMP/Periscope into the INSTOOLS system. A big part of the work involved understanding the overlap between the two ways of doing instrumentation and measurement and finding ways to combine the two, eliminating redundancy when possible. In many ways the two systems (INSTOOLs and LAMP) compliment one another which simplified the integration, with INSTOOLS providing dynamic instrumenation of a slice (a feature not in LAMP) and LAMP providing active measurements (a feature not directly supported in INSTOOLs). We have combined the two and made them interoperate through the INSTOOLs portal which now provides access to both active and passive data measurements. This was demonstrated at the GEC 14 conference as part of the GEMINI project which combines the two into a single instrumentation and measurement infrastructure.
We continue to manage and operate the four Juniper routers located in Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Washington DC, and Atlanta. We have been using the routers in our testing and evaluations of the Shadownet CM, especially the AM API and stitching support. We continue to support and make available the Shadownet resources for use by GENI users, complete with graphical user interface support via FLACK and the INSTOOLs portal.
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)
- James Griffioen, Zongming Fei, Hussamuddin Nasir, Xiongqi Wu, Jeremy Reed, Charles Carpenter, "The Design of an Instrumentation System for Federated and Virtualized Network Testbeds", Proc. of the First IEEE Workshop on Algorithms and Operating Procedures of Federated Virtualized Networks (FEDNET), Maui, Hawaii, April 2012.
- James Griffioen, Zongming Fei, Hussanmuddin Nasir, Xiongqi Wu, Jeremy Reed, Charles Carpenter, "Teaching with the Emerging GENI Network", Proc. of the 2012 International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering (FECS), Las Vegas, NV, July 2012.
D. Outreach activities
- Zongming Fei gave a talk on "Teaching with the Emerging GENI Network" at the 2012 International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering in Las Vegas, NV on July 19, 2012.
- Zongming Fei and Hussanmuddin Nasir gave a tutorial at the GENI experimenter summer camp at Rochester Institute of Technology in May 2012.
- We gave a Shadownet Demo at GEC 14 that demonstrated the ability to stitch Shadownet resources into other aggregates, and showed an early prototype of the one-stop portal service.
E. Collaborations
Most of our collaborations continue to be with the Shadownet team. In particular, it involves participants from Kentucky, AT<pre>&</pre>T, and Internet2, but we have also had several conversations with our ProtoGENI and perfSONAR colleagues.