The ProtoGENI team at the University of Utah has built a prototype GENI control framework, complete with software and a wide range of hardware. It has a strong focus on providing a usable system to experimenters rapidly, and is open for use by early adopters at www.protogeni.net.

ProtoGENI has a full federation implementation, and is able to allocate slices on a large number of wired and wireless components on configurable networks. It is also able to allocate  programmable nodes on residential broadband with a wireless mesh, part of CMU’s HomeNet project, and geographically distributed nodes that are part of Princeton’s PlanetLab project. This summer, the ProtoGENI team will extend collaboration and experimentation opportunities into the network core by deploying PCs, “NetFPGA” programmable network devices and configurable network switches across the country on dedicated bandwidth, in partnership with Internet2 and HP.

The ProtoGENI project includes a large-scale integration of existing and in-development systems that provide key GENI functionality. ProtoGENI software provides the control framework that is central to integration of other GENI prototypes developed at Georgia Tech, CMU, the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.  The integration will consist of four key components:

•    A nationwide, high-speed dedicated backbone on Internet2’s wave infrastructure
•    A set of sliceable, user-programmable components embedded in this backbone, including PCs and programmable hardware, NetFPGA cards
•    A set of subnets, including a  variety of wireless networks, residential broadband, and programmable edge clusters that will be connected to the backbone
•    Control framework software from the University of Utah, based on an enhanced version of the Emulab testbed management software

According to Lead Designer Robert Ricci, building the new software on Emulab is key to ProtoGENI team’s rapid progress. Emulab has been in use by network researchers for almost a decade, with thousands of users in hundreds of projects, controlling over a thousand nodes at dozens of sites around the world. It supported more than 18 thousand experiments last year alone. Using the Emulab software as a base has allowed the the ProtoGENI team to make over 1,200 nodes on 13 different node or link types available via GENI APIs in just a few months. Emulab has a strong background in configuring entire networks, as well as providing rich environments and services for experimentation across a diverse set of hardware.

Because there are no existing control frameworks that can handle the scope, diversity, and scale expected in GENI, the Utah team is extending Emulab’s capabilities to implement a framework that can allocate resources and manage access to abundant resources on diverse components. The Utah team has the basic clearinghouse, aggregate manager, and slice authority up and running, has delivered documentation of design decisions and plans, a release of Emulab software that includes early versions of ProtoGENI extensions, and an early RSpec prototype and credential and ticket formats.

One of the team’s most significant achievements so far has been enabling federation between sites, using the ProtoGENI APIs, so collaboration among the many other GENI teams running Emulab has already begun.  Four sites are already members of this federation. Robert and his team have been working with Jim Griffoen at the University of Kentucky, Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin, Dave Andersen at CMU, Nick Feamster at Georgia Tech, and Yan Luo at UMass-Lowell to deploy early control framework software on a wide range of systems.  A measurement system at University of Wisconsin, a BGP route multiplexer at Georgia Tech, and instrumentation tools at University of Kentucky will be integrated later this year.