GEC17: GENI Instrumentation and
Measurement Sessions
Sun. July 21, Mon. July 22, 2013
Marshall Brinn, Jeanne Ohren
GPO
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation
Outline
• We will be holding two sessions at this GENI
Engineering Conference (GEC) to focus on the
I&M efforts
– [1] I&M: Topics and Status [Sunday 7/21 1030-1200]
– [2] I&M: Looking Forward [Monday 7/22 1330-1530]
• The goal of these sessions are to take a shortterm and long-term view of the I&M project
– [1] Where are have we gotten to? What are our current
status and issues? What are our natural next steps?
– [2] Where should we try to steer to I&M effort in the
remaining project scope?
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Focus on the Experimenters
• As we take stock on the I&M efforts and try to plot the path
forward, try to keep the needs of experimenters in the front
of your minds
– The ultimate metric of our success is the degree to which we’ve
helped experimenters use GENI to pursue their research
• Remember that we’re trying to support two populations:
– “Power Experimenters”: Knowledgeable researchers who want to
use the full power of GENI and the I&M tools to perform large-scale,
highly customized, complex experiments.
– “Beginners”: Grad-students or even undergraduates who are
relatively new to network research and for whom we want to provide
an easy path to do reasonably interesting/enlightening things.
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Session 1: Sunday 7/21/2013 1030-1200
I&M: TOPICS AND STATUS
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Outline
• For both GEMINI and GIMI [15 minutes each]
– Discussion of current status and issues
• Where are we at?
• What’s been good or hard in developing or integrating your
capability?
• What might you suggest we do differently technically, or
administratively?
– Sneak-peak at tonight’s demo sessions: What will you
be highlighting?
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Outline [2]
• [30 min.] Looking for opportunities for valueadded contributions:
– What functionality (from your own I&M effort) do you
think could provide significant value to other I&M efforts
or GENI services (Clearinghouse, tools, aggregates)?
– What functionality (from other I&M efforts or other GENI
services) would you like to leverage to strengthen your
offering to experimenters?
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DISCUSSION
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Session 2: Monday 7/22/2013 1300-1530
I&M: LOOKING FORWARD
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Outline
• Try to imagine what your demo at GEC18 should
or could look like
– Or perhaps GEC19 or GEC20…
• What additional kinds of interoperability and
collaboration between I&M and other GENI
services could be developed to enhance
experimenter experience?
• Specifically, how can GEMINI and GIMI leverage
and integrate each other’s capabilities to provide
uniform and value-added services?
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Motivation
This second session is to encourage out-of-the-box thinking about the I&M
effort and where we’re at and where we might or should go from here.
• We hope we can all step back and rethink a little
of our approach and direction, as appropriate.
– Obviously we don’t want to change for change’s sake
– Nor do we want to derail the good progress being made
on all fronts.
• But if there are “low hanging fruit” that we can
identify that would provide good value to
experimenters, we should try to identify and
pursue them.
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Some “provocative” thoughts
• GIMI has a strong orchestration story through
OMF
– Could GEMINI benefit from taking advantage of the
GIMI OMF framework?
• GEMINI has a strong set of topology and
measurement services
– Could GIMI benefit from integrating some of these
services into the GIMI portal or services?
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Some “provocative” thoughts [2]
• GEMINI Desktop uses ssh to configure resources,
while GIMI uses OMF (over XMPP).
– Can we discuss the relative strengths/weaknesses of
these two approaches?
• From both a developer and particularly an experimenter
perspective?
• Both GIMI and GEMINI use iRODS as their
essential experimental result store.
– Is there something to be gained from leveraging this
common feature (some way to communicate between
systems e.g.)?
– Could we benefit from re-focusing on common data
descriptions?
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Some “provocative” thoughts [3]
• What is the right level of explicit ‘programming’
that should be required to manage different
experiments:
– Should simple experiments require simple programs or
no (visible) programs at all?
– Should complex experiments be driven by programs or
something more like a user interface?
• Is there more we can or should be doing to
improve reproducibility of experiments?
– Capturing the running environment configuration, runscripts, control parameters, etc.
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DISCUSSION
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