CC* Integration-Large: Q-Factor: A Framework to Enable Ultra High-Speed Data Transfer Optimization based on Real-Time Network State Information provided by Programmable Data Planes

PI: Jeronimo Bezerra | Florida International University | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

Communication networks are critical components of today’s scientific workflows. Researchers require long-distance, ultra high-speed networks to transfer huge data from acquisition sites (such as Vera C. Rubin Observatory, also known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile) to processing sites, and to share measurements with scientists worldwide. However, while network bandwidth is continuously increasing, the majority of data transfers are unable to efficiently utilize the added capacity due to inherent limitations of parameter settings of the network transport protocols and the lack of network state information at the end hosts. To address these challenges, Q-Factor plans to use temporal network state data to dynamically configure current transport protocol parameters to reach higher network utilization and, as a result, to improve scientific workflows.

CC* Integration-Small: Science Traffic as a Service (STAAS)

PI: Jack Brassil | Princeton University | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

Science Traffic as a Service (STAAS) is a decentralized system to collect, create and distribute a diverse collection of real and synthetic science network traffic to the experimental research infrastructure user community. Available on-demand to experimenters through a publish-subscribe dashboard, the tool will elevate traffic selection and distribution to a first class experimental instrumentation resource.

The STAAS team is developing a cooperative, scalable, infrastructure-agnostic end system traffic generation service. They will deploy the system first on the Network Programming Initiative testbed reaching from Princeton to Cornell, and then ready STAAS for later deployment on the FABRIC research infrastructure. Their key insight is that plenty of science flows are already in transit at any moment, either on campus or crossing the campus border. They plan to tap these available active science flows and process each for forwarding onto the experimental testbed, while preserving both the timing integrity of the flows and the data privacy of their headers and payloads. To do this safely, science traffic will flow only when offered by an originating campus and requested by the experimenter. By introducing a service model, STAAS hopes to help advance the networking research community’s understanding of emerging science traffic and to help the operators of scientific instruments improve the efficiency of global data distribution.

CC* Integration-Small: Integrating Application Agnostic Learning with FABRIC for Enabling Realistic High-Fidelity Traffic Generation and Modeling

PI: Deniz Gurkan | University of Houston | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

Novel approaches to networking and application development require high-fidelity testing and evaluation supported by realistic network usage scenarios. This project will provide researchers the means to easily utilize the capabilities of the FABRIC testbed through a suite of new tools – smoothing the transition of existing experiments to the testbed and enabling exciting new areas of research through three systems facilitating end to end traffic modeling and generation in the FABRIC environment. A model repository will be created for the storage and access of custom models by experimenters and will be seeded with stock models of some popular applications for immediate use. The use of the models within FABRIC-hosted experiments will be advanced through a bespoke matching system that will align experiment resources with model requirements. Finally, for experiments developing novel applications, a tool will be provided for creating new models using data captured with FABRIC infrastructure components.

CC* Integration-Large: SciStream: Architecture and Toolkit for Data Streaming between Federated Science Instruments

PI: Rajkumar Kettimuthu | University of Chicago | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

Scientific instruments are capable of generating data at very high speeds. However, with traditional file-based data movement and analysis methods, data are often processed at a much lower speed, leading to either operating the instruments at a lower speed or discarding a portion of the data without processing it. To address this issue, the SciStream project will develop software tools to stream data at very high speeds from scientific instruments to supercomputers at a distant location. Through a set of gateway nodes optimized for wide area memory-to-memory transfers at the perimeter of the campus network, SciStream establishes necessary bridging between source and destination. SciStream hides the complexities in network connections from the end user and provides a high level of security for all the network connections. Key design choices such as application-agnostic streaming and support for best-effort streaming will make SciStream appealing to a broader science community.

CC* Integration-Small: Error Free File Transfer for Big Science

PI: Craig Patridge | Colorado State University | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

This project will improve the Internet’s ability to support big data transfers, both for science and commerce, for decades to come. Scientific data transfers have gotten so large that previously rare transmission errors in the Internet are causing some scientific data transfers to be corrupted. The Internet’s error checking mechanisms were designed at a time when a megabyte was a large file. Now files can contain terabytes. The old error checking mechanisms are in danger of being overwhelmed. This project seeks to find new error checking mechanisms for the Internet to safely move tomorrow’s scientific data efficiently and without errors by addressing two fundamental issues.

First, the Internet’s checksums and message digests are too small (32-bits) and probably are poorly tuned to today’s error patterns. The first step in this project is to collect information about the kinds of transmission errors currently happening in the Internet for a comprehensive study. Second, today’s file transfer protocols, if they find a file has been corrupted in transit, simply discard the file and transfer it again. Rather, the file transfer protocol should seek to repair the corrupted parts of the file. As the project collects data about errors, it will also design a new file transfer protocol that can incrementally verify and repair files.

CC* Integration-Large: N-DISE: NDN for Data Intensive Science Experiments

PI: Edmund Yeh | Northeastern University | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

The project, N-DISE (Named Data Networking for Data Intensive Science Experiments), aims to accelerate the pace of breakthroughs and innovations in data-intensive science fields such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) high energy physics program and the BioGenome and human genome projects. Based on Named Data Networking (NDN), a data-centric architecture, N-DISE will deploy and commission a highly efficient and field-tested petascale data distribution, caching, access and analysis system serving major science programs.

The N-DISE project will design and develop high-throughput caching and forwarding methods, containerization techniques, hierarchical memory management subsystems, congestion control mechanisms, integrated with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) acceleration subsystems, to produce a system capable of delivering LHC and genomic data over a wide area network at throughputs approaching 100 Gbits per second, while significantly decreasing download time. In addition, N-DISE will utilize NDN’s built-in data security support to ensure data integrity and provenance tracing. N-DISE will leverage existing infrastructure and build an enhanced testbed with four additional high performance NDN data cache servers at participating institutions.

CC* Integration-Large: An ‘On-the-fly’ Deeply Programmable End-to-End Network-Centric Platform for Edge-to-Core Workflows

PI: Michael Zink | University of Massachusetts Amherst | Award Abstract | Project Overview Slides

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (also known as drones) are becoming popular in the sky. Their application reaches from hobby drones for leisurely activities to life-critical drones for organ transport to commercial applications such as air taxis. The safe, efficient, and economic operation of such drones poses a variety of challenges that have to be addressed by the science community. For example, drones need very detailed, close to the ground weather information for safe operations, and data processing and energy consumption of drones need to be intelligently handled. This project will provide tools that will allow researchers and drone application developers to address operational drone challenges by using advanced computer and network technologies.

This project will provide an architecture and tools that will enable scientists to include edge computing devices in their computational workflows. This capability is critical for low latency and ultra-low latency applications like drone video analytics and route planning for drones. The proposed work will include four major tasks. First, cutting edge network and compute infrastructure will be integrated into the overall architecture to make them available as part of scientific workflows. Second, in-network processing at the network edge and core will be made available through new programming abstractions. Third, enhanced end-to-end monitoring capabilities will be offered. Finally, the architecture will leverage the Pegasus Workflow Management System to integrate in-network and edge processing capabilities.

Do you have a project idea that would benefit from using FABRIC? We are interested in working with you. Apply for a Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) grant – the solicitation’s next deadline is March 1, 2021.

A new $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will expand FABRIC, a project to build the nation’s largest cyberinfrastructure testbed, to four preeminent scientific institutions in Asia and Europe. The expansion represents an ambitious effort to accelerate scientific discovery by creating the networks needed to move vast amounts of data across oceans and time zones seamlessly and securely.

Science is fast outgrowing the capabilities of today’s Internet infrastructure. To fully capitalize on big data, artificial intelligence, advanced computation and the Internet of Things requires robust, interconnected computers, storage, networks and software. Uneven progress in science cyberinfrastructure has led to bottlenecks that stymie collaboration and slow the process of discovery.

FABRIC, launched in 2019 with a $20 million grant from NSF, is building a cyberinfrastructure platform where computer scientists can reimagine the Internet and test new ways to store, compute, and move data. With the new NSF award, a sister project called FABRIC Across Borders (FAB) will link FABRIC’s nationwide infrastructure to nodes in Japan, Switzerland, the U.K. and the Netherlands.

“FAB allows collaborative international science projects to experiment with ways to do their science more efficiently,” said FAB Principal Investigator Anita Nikolich, Director of Technology Innovation at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences and Cyber Policy Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy at University of Chicago. “Sending large quantities of data long distances—across borders and oceans—is complicated when your science depends on real-time processing so you don’t miss once in a lifetime events. Being able to put FABRIC nodes in physically distant places allows us to experiment with the infrastructure to support new capabilities and also bring disparate communities together.”

FAB will be led by the University of Illinois along with core team members from RENCI at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the University of Kentucky; the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet); Clemson University; and the University of Chicago. Over three years, the team will work with international partners to place FABRIC nodes at the University of Tokyo; CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland; the University of Bristol in the U.K.; and the University of Amsterdam.

The project is driven by science needs in fields that are pushing the limits of what today’s Internet can support. As new scientific instruments are due to come online in the next few years—generating ever larger data sets and demanding ever more powerful computation—FAB gives researchers a testbed to explore and anticipate how all that data will be handled and shared among collaborators spanning continents.

“FAB will offer a rich set of network-resident capabilities to develop new models for data delivery from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to physicists worldwide,” said Rob Gardner, Deputy Dean for Computing and research professor in the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago and member of FAB’s core team. “As we prepare for the high luminosity LHC, the FAB international testbed will provide a network R&D infrastructure we’ve never had before, allowing us to consider novel analysis systems that will propel discoveries at the high energy frontier of particle physics.”

“FABRIC will tremendously help the ATLAS experiment in prototyping and testing at scale some of the innovative ideas we have to meet the high throughput and big data challenges ATLAS will face during the high luminosity LHC era,” said ATLAS computing coordinators Alessandro Di Girolamo, a staff scientist in CERN’s IT department, and Zach Marshall, an ATLAS physicist from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The ATLAS physics community will be excited to test new ways of doing analysis, better exploiting the distributed computing infrastructure we run all around the world.”

To ensure the project meets the needs of the scientists it aims to serve, FAB will be built around use cases led by scientific partners in five areas:

Physics (high energy physics use cases at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider) Space (astronomy and cosmology use cases in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the Cosmic Microwave Background-Stage 4 project) Smart cities (sensing and computing use cases to advance smart, connected communities for the NSF SAGE project and work at the University of Antwerp and the University of Bristol) Weather (use cases to improve weather and climate prediction at the University of Miami and Brazil’s Center for Weather Forecast and Climatic Studies) Computer science (use cases in private 5G networks at the University of Tokyo; censorship evasion at Clemson University; network competition and sharing at the University of Kentucky; and software-defined networking and P4 programming at South Korea’s national research and engineering network, KREONET) FAB will connect with existing U.S. and international cyberinfrastructure testbeds and bring programmable networking hardware, storage, computers, and software into one interconnected system. All software associated with FAB will be open source and posted in a publicly available repository: https://github.com/fabric-testbed/.

We received 183 complete responses (251 total), of which 22% were from faculty, 68% from students, 10% from professional researchers, postdocs and technical staff.

• Across those groups, 40% used GENI for research, 80% used it for education (many used GENI for both). • Over 40% used it periodically during the semester, and 30% reported using it weekly. • Their activities spanned a wide variety of research topics, from network architectures and protocols, to security, virtualization and software-defined networking. • Overwhelmingly 83% of respondents found GENI to be beneficial or very beneficial to their research or educational activities.

Faculty using GENI for teaching reported using GENI in classes that had a total over 4000 students. Many taught regularly recurring classes on Computer Communications, Networking, Cybersecurity, and Cloud Computing.

Respondents collectively reported publishing 245 papers that benefitted from GENI. Respondents provided 31 specific citations of these papers published between 2011 and 2020; 26 of these 31 were not previously listed in the GENI Bibliography.

For more details please download the full survey report, GENI 2020 Survey.

Participants at the GRW at the University of Oregon

The theme of the workshop was security experiments, in keeping with the interests of Prof. Li and his colleagues.  It included tutorials that used GENI resources to experiment with man-in-the-middle attacks on Wi-Fi hotspots, denial of service attack mitigation using software defined networking, using virtual network function concepts to implement a dynamically scalable intrusion detection system, and creating and detecting covert storage channels.

The workshop opened the morning of November 3 with talks by Chip Elliot of Raytheon BBN Technologies, Eric Keller of the University of Colorado and Prasad Calyam of the University of Missouri at Columbia.  Chip talked about moving beyond today’s Internet with its physical routers, switches and exchange points to a software defined infrastructure that is sliced and virtualized.  Eric Keller talked about stateless network functions that make networks more resilient and easier to manage.  Prasad spoke on the importance of edge computing and the division of tasks between the edge and the cloud for real-time applications and for the Internet of Things.

Jun Li, Prasad Calyam and Eric Keller make presentations at the GRW.

The morning also included presentations by the GRW host Jun Li and his colleague Ram Durairajan on their research projects including a network security research project called Drawbridge that uses GENI for experimentation and evaluation.

Two tracks of tutorials were offered the afternoon of November 3.  A beginners track consisted of tutorials on getting started with GENI and an introduction to running software defined networking (SDN) experiments on GENI.  A parallel track for those with some prior experience with GENI consisted of two security tutorials that used GENI wired and wireless resources.

Three tutorials were offered on Saturday November 4: Building a load adaptive intrusion detection system on GENI using Network Function Virtualization, covert channel creation and detection, and edge-cloud experiments using GENI and the Chameleon cloud testbed.

Xenia Mountrouidou, Joon Yee Chuah and Violet Syrotiuk lead tutorials at the GRW.

Instructors at the GRW were Nabeel Akhtar (Boston University), Joon Yee Chuah (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Fraida Fund (New York University), Xenia Mountrouidou (College of Charleston), Paul Ruth (RENCI), Violet Syrotiuk (Arizona State University) and Vic Thomas (BBN Technologies).

For details of this workshop please see http://geni.uoregon.edu.

If you are interested in hosting a GRW, please contact Violet Syrotiuk or Abraham Matta.  These 1–2 day workshops deliver a focused introduction to GENI, using lectures and hands-on tutorials, that new users find most helpful to begin using GENI effectively in their work.

Participants at GENI NICE 2017.

Ken Calvert of the NSF made a keynote presentation on the Challenges and Opportunities in Computing Research Infrastructure.  He urged attendees to respond to an NSF “Dear colleague” letter soliciting requirements for future research infrastructure.  Raouf Boutaba of the University of Waterloo delivered a second keynote that traced the evolution of software defined infrastructure testbeds developed by him and his collaborators, leading up to the Canadian Smart Applications on Virtualized Infrastructure (SAVI) testbed that is federated with GENI.

Ken Calvert and Raouf Boutaba deliver keynotes at GENI NICE

Glenn Ricart of US Ignite organized a session on the use of GENI for Smart and Connected Communities applications.  Speakers in this session described applications for medical training, power grid monitoring, first responders and education.

Manu Gosain of the PAWR Project Office organized a panel on Experimentation on Large Scale Research Platforms.  The panelists—KK Ramakrishnan of the University of California at Riverside, Kapil Dandekar of Drexel University and Paul Ruth of RENCI—spoke on NFV and experimentation with next generation cellular systems, SDR testbeds for repeatable wireless experiments that use different protocols and large scale experiments that span ExoGENI and Chameleon cloud resources.

Flavio Esposito of St. Louis University and Abraham Matta of Boston University organized a session cleverly titled (Cutting) Edge Networking.  Talks in this session covered geographic routing in edge clouds, infrastructure-less software defined wireless networks, offloading compute tasks from IoT devices to edge clouds and intent based specification of network properties by its end users.

Violet Syrotiuk of Arizona State University organized a session on Reproducibility in Testbed Research that included talks on facilities being built into the Chameleon cloud testbed to aid repeatability, the Popper infrastructure that brings together DevOps tools for use by experimenters to build replicable experiments and the experiences of a research team that was awarded an ACM Badge for Repeatability for one of their papers.

GENI NICE participants and those from three other co-located ICNP workshops came together for a panel on Hot Topics in Networking and their Testbed Requirements.  The panel was moderated by Jack Brassil of the NSF. The panelists—Rick McGeer of US Ignite, Raouf Boutaba of the University of Waterloo, Mohammad Chaudhry of Soptimizer Canada, Pascal Poupart of the University of Waterloo, KK Ramakrishnan of the University of California at Riverside, Glenn Ricart of US Ignite and Abraham Matta of Boston University—represented the networking research communities from all four ICNP workshops.  They brought academic and industry perspectives on topics such as data-driven networking, machine learning for network management, 5G and beyond wireless infrastructures, the need for repositories with real network data and traffic, testbeds that support a broad range of research activities by providing more control on experiment configurations, and testbed support for time-sensitive applications such as cyber-physical systems.

Pascal Poupart on the “Hot Topics in Networking and their Testbed needs” panel speaks to a standing room only audience.

NICE 2017 concluded with an informal reception that featured 18 demos and posters on research conducted on GENI and other testbeds.  On display were research projects in software defined networking, novel network protocols, clouds and distributed systems, next generation applications, education, tools and testbeds.

Participants from GENI NICE and other ICNP workshops mingle at the NICE Demo and Poster session.

For presentations made at NICE 2017 and for more details on the event please visit http://www.geni.net/nice2017.

The two keynote speakers at the GRW were Henning Schulzrinne, professor at Columbia University and former CTO of the FCC, and Lin Zhong of Rice University. Henning addressed the hype and challenges surrounding 5G wireless technologies and the need to tackle the associated complexity and security concerns.  Lin spoke on the challenges of building the next generation of wireless technologies and the work on multi-user MIMO being conducted by his group at Rice University.

The morning also included talks by Alex and Walt on their research, including projects that use GENI wired and wireless resources.

Henning Schulzrinne and Lin Zhong deliver keynotes at the GENI Regional Workshop

GRW attendees hear Alex Sprintson speak about his research using GENI

The afternoon of the GRW and the first two days of the camp included hands-on tutorials on the different kinds of research and experiments that can be conducted on GENI.  The emphasis was on wireless and software defined networking (SDN) experiments on GENI with three SDN tutorials, two wireless tutorials and one that combined these concepts in a tutorial on using SDN to manage handoff from one wireless network to another.

Summer Camp participants and instructors

Those attending the summer camp organized themselves into five project teams based on common research interests.  Each team defined a research topic, ran experiments on GENI to explore the topic and, at the end of the week, made a presentation on the results of their work.  The five projects were: (1)  WiFi Channel Planning that used the Orbit outdoor testbed to test a scheme that assigned non-overlapping channels to access points based on interference in various WiFi channels, (2) Routing in Disruption Tolerant Networks that evaluated a flooding based algorithm by breaking and restoring links on a software defined network, (3) Open Ended Cognitive Radio Design Challenge that evaluated multiple interference mitigation techniques using software define radios, (4) Network Monitoring and Computation Offloading that implemented a load balancing scheme across multiple compute servers, and (5) Handling Intrusions in SDNs that used software defined networking concepts to detect and block TCP SYN scan attacks.

Jason McConnell gives summer camp participants a tour of the LTE installation at TAMU

Many thanks to Alex Sprintson, Walt Magnussen, Robyn Richards, Carla Harris and Lauri Ditto for hosting the workshop and attending to the many details that helped make it an enjoyable and productive event.  Thanks also to the instructors Geddings Barineau (Clemson University), Abraham Matta and Nabeel Akhtar (Boston University), Dov Solomon (NYU Poly), Violet Syrotiuk (Arizona State University), Vicraj Thomas (GENI Project Office), Kirk Webb (University of Utah) and Junaid Zulfiqar (Clemson University).  And finally, thanks to Violet Syrotiuk and Abraham Matta for organizing a series of GRWs and camps at locations around the United States.

For more details of this workshop and camp and for copies of presentations made, see http://tx.ag/GENI.

The next GENI Regional Workshop will be held in November 2017 at the University of Oregon.  Watch for announcements on http://www.geni.net and on the geni-announce mailing list.

Over 100 researchers and educators participated in the 25th GENI Engineering Conference

The GEC began with a plenary session where Ken Calvert of the NSF described the NSF vision for TIPOFF and its relationship with other recent infrastructure initiatives such as PAWR; Manu Gosain, Project Director of PAWR, described the structure and plans of the new project office; and Shannon Mckeen of RENCI reported on the mission, structure and operations of the newly formed Future Cyberinfrastructure Consortium.

A series of three inter-related plenary demos presented emerging capabilities of software defined exchanges (SDXs) to coordinate diverse computing and networking resources, including software defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) across multiple administrative domains. Demonstrations drew on applications including data transfer, high-bandwidth video streaming, and service chaining in a network security context. These extremely ambitious demonstrations highlighted the ability to build sophisticated configurations of diverse resource types and domains, including research assets associated with different US research sponsorship organizations, a commercial cloud provider (Amazon web services) and collaborators abroad.

The plenary “Looking Ahead” session generated strong interest and conversations.  It was an opportunity for the GENI community to discuss future directions for the GENI infrastructure.  The session had two components.  The first was an international component where researchers from six different countries (Netherlands, Canada, Russia, Brazil, South Korea, and Germany) discussed their testbed plans and potential collaborations with GENI and other US testbeds. The second was on some potential improvements/new capabilities identified as high interest for GENI.  Four presentations briefly explored the capabilities and invited discussion on desirability and possible implementation.

Dongkyun Kim answers an audience question about the Korean KREONET Open Science Cloud testbed.

The very lively GEC demo session featured nineteen demos and posters that showcased GENI-based research and education projects.  The Steroid OpenFlow Service from Clemson University was voted best demo by the attendees.

Graciela Perera and Ambrasia Warner of Northeastern Illinois University explain their work using GENI and the Affinity Research Group (ARG) Model to foster deep learning.

GEC participants at the demo session.

Other sessions at the GEC included ones on GENI wireless deployments; experience reports from instructors and students who have used GENI for course assignments; presentations by researchers on their on-going work on GENI; and a developer roundtable session where GENI software transition and extensions to the aggregate manager and clearinghouse APIs were discussed.

Many thanks to Julio Ibarra, Jason Liu, Heidi Morgan, Vasilka Chergarova and the staff at the FIU Kovens Center for helping make this conference a success.

Please see: http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GEC25Agenda for the conference agenda and copies of presentations, https://www.flickr.com/gp/130699296@N05/zBP45e for photographs from the conference and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqEq6vGwyln-hBkpka-UqL2DQfuUPID-k for video recordings of the plenary sessions.

GENI NICE 2016

The second annual GENI NICE event was held on Monday December 12, 2016 at the National Academy of Sciences in Irvine, CA.  The event, co-located with CoNEXT 2016, attracted 74 researchers and educators from academia, industry and government.  Noteworthy aspects of NICE 2016 include:

• All sessions were proposed and organized by community members. GENI community members responded to a “Call for Sessions” and organized sessions they proposed.
• 24 community members responded to a “Call for Demos and Posters” and presented their work at a combined NICE demo session/CoNEXT welcome reception. Many of them stayed on to present their work at the CoNEXT poster session the following day.  The CoNEXT Student Workshop participants also presented posters at the NICE demo session.
• GENI NICE and two other co-located workshops—Cloud Assisted Network (CAN) and CoNEXT Student Workshop—came together for a lively panel on “What’s the Right Testbed for your Experiment” organized by Michael Zink of the University of Massachusetts and Murat Yuksel of the University of Central Florida.
• A keynote by Jack Brassil of the NSF on Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) and its relationship to existing and future research infrastructures.

Prof. Peter Steenkiste of CMU discusses testbed-based evaluation of the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) in the Non-IP Experiments over GENI session.

Ivan Seskar (Rutgers) and Jack Brassil (NSF) listen as Jerry Sobieski of NORDUnet describes the GÉANT Testbed Service (GTS) during the “What’s the right testbed for your experiment goals?” panel.

48 groups presented their research to NICE and CoNEXT participants in the evening demo and poster session.

The GENI NICE agenda included a panel on “What’s next for SDX research” organized by Russ Clark (Georgia Tech); a session on “Non-IP Experiments over GENI” organized by Nirmala Shenoy (RIT) and Abraham Matta (Boston University); and a session on “Applications and Services using the GENI Wireless Ecosystem” organized by Ivan Seskar (Rutgers University) and Abhimanyu Gosain (GENI Project Office).

Thanks to Abraham Matta (Boston University) and Violet Syrotiuk (Arizona State University) for   pulling together the technical program, and to the organizers of CoNEXT for ensuring GENI NICE needs for space, networking and audio-visual equipment were met.

For more information on GENI NICE 2016, see http://www.geni.net/nice2016.

GENI Regional Workshop

A GENI Regional Workshop (GRW) was hosted by Kuang-Ching Wang of Clemson University.  The one and a half day workshop was held on Friday December 2 and Saturday December 3.  Attendees included 35 students, 4 faculty and a testbed administrator.

Friday morning of the GRW featured two keynote talks: Michael Reiter of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spoke on how Project Silver is addressing security in cloud computing infrastructures, and James Griffieon of the University of Kentucky described an OpenFlow based Science DMZ deployed on his campus.  The attendees also heard from K-C Wang on how GENI transformed wired and wireless research projects led by him and others at Clemson by providing an infrastructure for exploration and validation by experimentation.

K-C Wang of Clemson University describes how his research was transformed by the GENI infrastructure.

The Friday afternoon and Saturday morning sessions consisted of two tracks with hands-on tutorials on Getting Started with GENI, CloudLab, Hadoop, OpenFlow, Network Function Virtualization, GENI Wireless and MobilityFirst.  Attendees were free to go between tracks and attend tutorials that matched their interests.

Many thanks to Prof. K-C Wang for hosting this GRW at short notice; to Violet Syrotiuk (Arizona State University), Linh Ngo (Clemson University), Geddings Barrineau (Clemson University), Ivan Seskar (Rutgers University) and Abraham Matta (Boston University) for leading tutorials; and Violet Syrotiuk and Abraham Matta for helping organize the event.

For more information on this GRW and for copies of presentations made at the workshop, see the workshop page.

GRW participants

The Regional Workshop, held on Monday May 23, attracted over 40 participants, most of whom were from universities in the Boston area.  The morning of the workshop included an Introduction to GENI by Mark Berman, GENI Project Director; a talk by Russ Clark of Georgia Tech on his research on GENI including Software Defined Exchanges (SDXs); and a talk by Tilman Wolf on ChoiceNet, an economy plane for the Internet.

The afternoon consisted of two tracks of tutorials.  Violet Syrotiuk led the My First GENI Experiment tutorial, Kobus Van der Merwe and Kirk Webb delivered tutorials on CloudLab and PhantomNet, and Geddings Barrineau led an OpenFlow tutorial.  The tutorials were selected based on preferences expressed by workshop participants during registration.

14 participants stayed the rest of the week for the summer camp. Additional tutorials were led by Steve Jarvis, Manu Gosain, Charles Carpenter, and Abraham Matta.  Summer camp participants learned to run advanced software defined and network function virtualization experiments, wireless experiments and to use tools such as GENI Desktop to instrument their experiments.   Participants formed four teams based on their research interest.  Each team defined and worked on a project during the week and did a demo and presentation on the last day of the camp.  The four projects were:

1. A Software Defined Networking (SDN) based firewall.  Only known switches were allowed to connect to their OpenFlow controller and only traffic from whitelisted networks were allowed into the internal network.
2. Covert channels in GENI.  Information was coded as delays between packets using a scheme similar to Morse code; each letter of the English alphabet was coded as a sequence of long and short delays between packets.  Decoding error rates were compared over low-latency GENI rack-local links and over high-latency links between GENI resources on the east and west coasts of the US.
3. Software defined radio.  The team programmed a software defined radio at New York University to receive and decode transponder transmissions from aircraft flying over Brooklyn, NY.
4. Using SDN to reduce the complexity of iBGP peering.  Their OpenFlow controller acts as an iBGP peer and installs flow rules on internal routers.  This eliminates the need for all iBGP routers to form a full mesh.

The feedback from camp participants was overwhelmingly positive.  All respondents to an online survey said the camp was well organized and met their expectations.  Coming into the camp, 80% said they have very little to no knowledge of GENI but by the end of the week 80% rated their knowledge of GENI to be high.  All respondents said they plan on using GENI for their research or teaching.  Many attendees said they would have liked more time to work on their projects.

Many thanks to Abraham Matta and the staff of the Hariri Institute at Boston University for hosting the workshop and summer camp.  Regional workshops deliver a focused introduction to GENI, using lectures and hands-on tutorials, that new users find most helpful to begin using GENI effectively in their work.  Week-long camps introduce participants to the wide range of experiments possible on GENI.  The projects at the camp help develop sufficient GENI knowledge and skills for the participants to start using it immediately for their research.

The next GENI Regional Workshop will be held in the Fall of 2016; subscribe to the geni-announce, geni-users or geni-educators mailing lists for announcements.  If you are interested in hosting a workshop or camp, please email help@geni.net.