Fei Yeh

Next Generation Clouds, the Chameleon Cloud Testbed, and Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Next generation clouds, based on highly programmable, high performance networks, especially those supported by Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) have attracted significant interest by research communities. In recognition of the increasing importance of advancing cloud services and technologies, especially for providing Internet services, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) established a project, the NSF Cloud initiative, to enable the computer science research community to develop and experiment with novel cloud architectures and create new, architecturally enabled innovative applications for cloud computing through empirical research experimentation by using large scale distributed cloud test beds. This paper provides an overview of one of those test beds, the Chameleon Cloud tested, with an additional description of the integration of that test bed with high programmable, high performance networks, based on SDN. The Chameleon project is designing, deploying, and operating a large scale, highly distributed experimental environment for empirical cloud research, integrated with high programmable networks as a foundation resource.

Software-Defined Network Exchanges (SDXs): Architecture, services, capabilities, and foundation technologies

Software Defined Networks (SDNs), primarily based on OpenFlow, are being deployed in single domain networks around the world. The popularity of SDNs has given rise to multiple considerations about designing, implementing, and operating Software-Defined Network Exchanges (SDXs), to enable SDNs to interconnect SDN islands and to extend SDNs across multiple domains. These goals can be accomplished only by developing new techniques that extend the single domain orientation of current SDN/OpenFlow approaches to include capabilities for multidomain control, including those for resource discovery, signaling, and dynamic provisioning. Several networking research communities have begun to investigate these concepts. Early architectural models of SDXs have been designed and implemented as prototypes. These SDXs are being used to conduct experiments and to demonstrate the potentials of SDXs.

Creating environments for innovation: Designing and implementing advanced experimental network research testbeds based on the Global Lambda Integrated Facility and the StarLight Exchange

Large scale national and international experimental research environments are required to advance communication services and supporting network architecture, technology, and infrastructure. Theories and concepts are often explored using simulation and modeling techniques within labs or on small scale testbeds. However, while such testbeds are valuable resources for the research process, these facilities alone cannot provide an appropriate approximation of the real world conditions required to explore ideas at scale. Very large scale global, experimental network research capabilities are required to deeply investigate innovative concepts. For many years, network testbeds were created to address fairly specific, well defined, limited research goals, and they were implemented for fairly short periods. Recently, taking advantage of a number of macro information technology trends, such as virtualization and programmable resources, several network research communities have been developing innovative types of network research environments. Instead of designing traditional network testbeds, research communities are designing large scale, highly flexible distributed platforms that can be used to create many different types of testbeds. Also, rather than creating short term testbeds for limited research objectives, these new environments are being designed as long term persistent resources to support many types of experimental research. This paper describes the motivations for this trend, provides several examples of large scale distributed network research environments based on the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) and the StarLight Exchange Facility, including the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), and indicates emerging future trends for these types of environments.

Network Virtualization Implementation over Global Research Production Networks

The concept of network virtualization has attracted increasing attention by researchers designing and modeling the next-generation Internet paradigm. Researchers need a new type of hybrid network to construct experimental environments for testing new services, architecture, and technologies, especially network protocols, without affecting existing traffic. This paper presents our work on implementing a large-scale testbed that has been created over production networks by integrating novel technologies such as cloud computing, software defined networking, and virtual switches. This approach provides researchers with an experimental networking testbed where traffic can be controlled via programmable virtual switches and dynamic adjustability for many types of network emulation experiments. This system also provides a feasible solution for the networking requirements of federated cloud system.

High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet): An advanced international research initiative and global experimental testbed

Currently, support for digital media is one of the fastest growing requirements of the Internet as demand transitions from services designed to support primarily text and images to those intended also to support rich, high quality streaming multi-media. In response to the need to address this important 21st century communications challenge, an international consortium of network research organizations has established an initiative, the High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet), to investigate key underlying problems, to design potential solutions, to prototype those solutions on a global experimental testbed, and to create an initial set of production services. The HPDMnet service is being designed not only to support general types of digital media but also those based on extremely high resolution, high capacity data streams. These HPDMnet services, which are based on a wide range of advanced architectural concepts at all layers, provide a framework for network middleware that allows non-traditional resources to enable new network services, including those based on dynamically provisioned international lightpaths supported by flexible optical-fiber and optical switching technology. These HPDMnet services have been showcased at major national and international forums, and they are being implemented within several next generation communications exchanges.

International network research testbed facilities based on OpenFlow: Architecture, services, technologies, and distributed infrastructure

Because communication services are global, to advance the state of the art for communication services along with underlying architecture, technologies, and facilities, network science research communities require world-wide experimental research facilities and testbeds. Previously, designing, implementing, and operating such global research facilities have been complex and fairly costly tasks. However, recently a number of trends have reduced the barriers to creating such large scale testbed facilities. These trends include wider deployments of fiber infrastructure, more flexible ligthpath channel control, new techniques for dynamic networking, lower cost components, and the emergence of highly programmable networking, in part, based on innovative control frameworks. Many emerging testbeds and related techniques are based on OpenFlow, which provides opportunities that enable a high degree of network customization, dynamic provisioning, and edge control. These trends are allowing international research facilities to be deployed and used to create and investigate innovative communication services, architecture, protocols, technologies, and facilities. Currently, network research organizations in a number of countries are collaborating to design and implement a persistent international experimental research facility that can be used to implement multiple testbeds and to prototype, investigate, and test network innovations for next generation global scale communication services, including personal networks. OpenFlow is a key resource that has been integrated into this facility. This international experimental network facility is already being used to support a wide range of experiments and to showcase demonstrations of network innovations.

AMROEBA: computational astrophysics modeling enabled by dynamic lambda switching

Many data and compute intensive Grid applications, such as computational astrophysics, may be able to benefit from networking supported by dynamically provisioned lightpaths. To date, the majority of high performance distributed environments have been based on traditional routed packet networks, provisioned as external services rather than as integrated components within those environments. Because this approach often cannot provide high performance capabilities required by these applications, an alternative distributed infrastructure architecture is being designed based on dynamic lightpaths, supported by optical networks. These designs implement communication services and infrastructure as integral components of distributed infrastructure. The resultant environments resemble large scale specialized instruments. Presented here is one such architecture, implemented on a wide-area, optical Grid test bed, featuring a closely integrated dedicated lightpath mesh. The test bed was used to conduct a series of experiments to explore its potential for supporting adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) astrophysics simulations. While preliminary, the results of these experiments indicate that this architecture may provide the deterministic capabilities required by a wide range of high performance distributed services and applications, especially for computational science.

Creating a Worldwide Network For the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and Related Experimental Environments

Many important societal activities are global in scope, and as these activities continually expand world-wide, they are increasingly based on a foundation of advanced communication services and underlying innovative network architecture, technology, and core infrastructure. To continue progress in these areas, research activities cannot be limited to campus labs and small local testbeds or even to national testbeds. Researchers must be able to explore concepts at scale—to conduct experiments on world-wide testbeds that approximate the attributes of the real world. Today, it is possible to take advantage of several macro information technology trends, especially virtualization and capabilities for programming technology resources at a highly granulated level, to design, implement and operate network research environments at a global scale. GENI is developing such an environment, as are research communities in a number of other countries. Recently, these communities have not only been investigating techniques for federating these research environments across multiple domains, but they have also been demonstration prototypes of such federations. This chapter provides an overview of key topics and experimental activities related to GENI international networking and to related projects throughout the world.

Distributed optical testbed (DOT): a grid applications and optical communications testbed

The distributed optical testbed (DOT) is a wide area experimental grid infrastructure designed to facilitate the creation of new techniques for the efficient execution of distributed applications, supported by agile optical networks. The architecture of the testbed enables the close investigation of new methods for supporting distributed heterogeneous environments that are interconnected by high performance, application-addressable lightpaths. Currently, almost all grid implementations are supported through communication services based on non-adaptive, non-deterministic packet-routed data networks. The DOT architecture allows grid applications to take advantage of flexible, reconfigurable, and deterministic optical channels. By directly provisioning lightpaths, applications can enhance data communications by supplementing or by passing traditional data transport services. Experiments conducted on this testbed demonstrate that a significant potential exists for supporting grid applications through adaptive optical networking

Designing and deploying a bioinformatics software-defined network exchange (SDX): Architecture, services, capabilities, and foundation technologies

This paper describes a Bioinformatics Software Defined Network Exchange (SDX) or BioSDX, which has been designed, deployed, and demonstrated by a multi-organizational research consortium to enable bioinformatics knowledge discovery supported by dynamic networking services. This BioSDX uses precision networking to support precision medicine. The BioSDX is based on recent technical developments in infrastructure abstraction that enables new types of tools and services utilizing programmable network infrastructure through high levels of resource virtualization. Combined with close integration of programmable cloud computing facilities, the BioSDX is an important advance in supporting the new paradigm of data intensive bioinformatics across multiple disciplines, including computational genomics and precision medicine.