Workshop description
OpenLab brings together the essential ingredients for an open, general purpose and sustainable large scale shared experimental facility, providing advances to the early and successful prototypes serving the demands of Future Internet Research and Experimentation, including several OneLab testbeds. It deploys the software and tools that allow these advanced testbeds to support a diverse set of applications and protocols in more efficient and flexible ways.
This workshop "Federation Architecture & tools" proposes to discuss and advance on a set of key topics in accordance with the objectives of OpenLab. It will be divided in 3 thematic sessions where participants are invited to submit short talks:
Central services for federation
One recurrent debate in our community has to do with the extent to which an effective testbed federation must depend upon centralized services. For instance, in FIRE there is the notion of a portal that serves as the entry point for users willing to conduct experiments on one or several of the federated facilities. This session will welcome talks about, but not limited to, the following topics:
- division of roles, competencies and obligations between the local (the individual testbeds) and the federal layers;
- content and level of detail of central services offered at the federal level
RSpecs, Reservation, Policies
SFA (Slice-based Federation Architecture) has emerged as the de-facto standard for federating heterogeneous infrastructures. It consists in a common API implemented by all testbeds, and offers a secure and distributed thin-waist, providing the glue between the different testbeds. Testbed-specific information is transported over SFA as part of XML-encoded information denoted RSpecs, whose structure is being defined up to a certain level. This session will welcome talks about, but not limited to, the following topics:
- status and evolution of RSpecs and client-side support;
- implementation of reservation on top of RSpecs;
- client- and server-side tools for reservation, scheduling, etc.;
- policies.
Monitoring tools and other topics
Instrumentation of the different infrastructures is of utmost importance in enabling scientific experiments, making sense of the results, and ensuring their reproducibility. Here, we face an additional challenge since researchers use both standalone testbeds and conduct larger cross-testbed experiments. This session will welcome talks about, but not limited to, the following topics:
- measurement and monitoring tools at the local and federal levels;
- interconnection of instrumentation mechanisms;
- exposing monitoring information to users;
This last session will also be the opportunity for other topics of interest that do not directly fit into the previous sections.