CHAPEL HILL, Dec. 9, 2011–RENCI at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University in partnership with IBM will lead a new project to build a nationwide test bed for networking and networked cloud computing.

The project is part of NSF’s Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) initiative, which enables researchers to explore networks of the future.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded just over $2 million to the three-year ExoGENI project, led by Ilia Baldine, director of RENCI’s networking research group and Jeff Chase, a Duke University computer science professor.

The project will deploy and operate 13 ExoGENI sites at research universities and labs across the U.S.  The project will use software based on the Open Resource Control Architecture (ORCA) to control the networked cloud infrastructure. The project team developed the ORCA platform in earlier NSF-funded research and extended it for use in the GENI initiative.

Each ExoGENI site will receive a rack of equipment with multiple IBM x3650 servers featuring dual socket Intel Westmere and Sandy Bridge CPUs, each with 6 to 8 cores and 48 gigabytes of RAM. The sites will connect to a variety of advanced research networks offering dynamic circuit capabilities and programmable control.

ExoGENI sites in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area will connect to each other using RENCI’s Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), a networking test bed that links RENCI, Duke, NC State University and UNC-Chapel Hill. The sites will link to national research networks such as National Lambda Rail (NLR), Internet2 and the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet).

The ORCA control software will enable experimenters to construct on demand private virtual networks spanning these research networks and ExoGENI sites. ExoGENI racks will use OpenFlow-enabled switches to link to OpenFlow-enabled campus infrastructures and national networks. OpenFlow technology separates a network switch’s packet forwarding, or data, path from its high-level routing decisions, or control path, thereby allowing researchers to easily deploy innovative routing and switching protocols.

When all the hardware is operational and all the sites are connected, ExoGENI will operate as a networked cloud infrastructure—a virtual laboratory for networking and computer science experiments that will help researchers advance the development of a faster, smarter and more reliable Internet, said Baldine.

“Future computer science and applied research must bring together computation, storage and network capabilities on a global scale to address emerging complex problems related to network science, large-scale distributed computations, large dataset mobility and future network architectures,” said Baldine. “With ExoGENI researchers will gain a global, elastic reconfigurable platform to conduct such research.”

ExoGENI will support a variety of experiments that will create network topologies consisting of nodes allocated from ExoGENI sites tied together with network connections that will be provisioned based on the bandwidth needed for the experiment. ExoGENI will support using custom kernels to experiment with different network protocols. To support research into high-speed protocols, some ExoGENI sites will be capable of transferring data at 10 gigabits per second (Gbp/s) and in the future at 40 Gbp/s and 100 Gbp/s.

Using ExoGENI, researchers will be able to allocate private networks spanning the continental U.S., allocate computing clusters and storage for use by scientists who collect and analyze data, and tie these experimental resources to production networks, devices or instruments. Because ExoGENI will interact with other networking and compute resources assembled through the GENI initiative, researchers will be able to create more powerful assemblies, or slices, of linked resources that include wireless, mobile and sensor networks.

In addition, ExoGENI will serve as a test environment for a global federated cloud infrastructure that can reconfigure collections of linked computational resources as needed and bring together diverse resources from multiple cloud providers. Such an environment could someday replace typical institutional computational resources, which today exist in a single lab or data center.

ExoGENI sites will be deployed over the course of the next 18-24 months and the facility will begin operation as soon as the first sites are deployed. The first four sites will be operational before the end of September 2012.

But they don’t need these resources all the time.

Ideally, a scientist studying the properties of new materials for producing solar energy, for example, would be able to grab a “slice” of a high-bandwidth pipeline, set their workflow in motion, grab compute resources in the cloud and then release those resources, so they could be used by other researchers in different configurations.

At the RENCI/North Carolina research exhibit at SC11, three demonstrations by the RENCI networking research group and Duke University will use ORCA, the Open Resource Control Architecture, to bring together cyber resources from multiple providers as needed to accommodate a scientific workflow.

ORCA was developed by Duke computer science professor Jeff Chase and his students with funding from the National Science Foundation. It is one of the experimental control frameworks for the NSF’s Global Environments for Network Innovation (GENI) project. GENI is a virtual laboratory for networking experiments that will help researchers develop the tools and protocols that will define future internets. With funding from the Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and the NSF Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure program, researchers are adapting ORCA as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for serving the diverse needs of computational scientists.

The first demonstration will execute a scientific workflow by using ORCA to allocate a slice of computational resources from multiple cloud providers and bandwidth-provisioned network connections between provider sites. The workflow, managed by the Pegasus workflow management system, will use six serial applications, which will run on Condor clusters dynamically provisioned from clouds owned by RENCI in Chapel Hill, NC, and by Duke University in Durham, NC. The two clouds are connected by the Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), an experimental network that connects RENCI and its partner institutions at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.

A final large MPI application will run on several thousand processors on Hopper, a Cray Xe6 system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley, CA.

ORCA will provision several network resources to move data across the continent, starting with BEN in North Carolina. From the southeastern U.S., the workflow will make its way to NERSC, first via the National Lambda Rail, then to the StarLight interconnect in Chicago, and finally via ESnet, the Energy Science Network, to NERSC.

“We will set up a collection of disparate resources in multiple clouds that never existed before and won’t exist once the job is completed,” said Ilia Baldine, director of the RENCI networking research group. “We plan to show that ORCA is an Infrastructure as a Service platform suitable for both GENI experimenters and computational scientists and that it is capable of provisioning resources as they are needed and then allowing them to return to their owners to be accessed by other users.”

The science: new materials for solar energy

The scientific job will be a simplified version of a workflow used to apply effective forward design strategies to the discovery of new materials for solar energy. In inverse design, scientists start with a set of desired electronic properties for a material and then search for the best structure. A major step in the process is the calculation of a particular property that occurs as part of the forward chain. The workflow will examine the electronic structure of moieties of Ruthenium (Ru) molecules and attempt to determine their total energy. Ruthenium can absorb light in the visible spectrum, which makes it a good candidate for a material used in cost-effective solar energy cells. The work is supported under U.S-DOE SciDAC-e award DE-FC02-06ER25764, “Enhancing Productivity of Materials Discovery Computations for Solar Fuels and Next Generation Photovoltaics.”

A related demonstration will use the ORCA framework to execute a Hadoop workflow on multiple clouds connected through bandwidth-provisioned network pipelines.  Hadoop is a software framework for data-intensive distributed applications. A third demonstration will take a closer look at a part of the first demonstration: the on-demand provisioning of computational infrastructure to stand up a Condor cluster in a networked cloud environment.

The demonstrations will take place in the RENCI booth (2942).  Demonstration times are:

• Monday, Nov. 14: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
• Tuesday, Nov. 15: 10:30 a.m. (demo 1), 11:30 a.m. (demo 2) and 1 p.m. (demo 3)
• Wednesday, Nov. 16: 10:30 a.m. (demo 1), 2 p.m. (demo 2) and 2:30 p.m. (demo 3)
• Thursday, Nov. 17: 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (demos 1, 2 and 3)

ORCA was developed at the Duke University New Internet Computing Lab by computer science professor Jeff Chase and his students. RENCI and Duke are partners in a GENI project to evaluate ORCA as a future Internet control plane framework.

For more information:

ORCA/BEN website

Networked Clouds website

GENI Project website

RENCI website

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.—New funding was announced this week for the RENCI and Duke University project to develop a dark fiber network where researchers can create and manage network experiments.

RENCI and Duke will receive Spiral 2 funding of $150,000 from the National Science Foundation’s  Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project. That money and a previous award will be used to continue developing the Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), a project of RENCI, Duke and Infinera, and to further refine the Open Resource Control Architecture (ORCA).  Originally developed by Duke computer scientist Jeff Chase, ORCA serves as the resource control system for BEN.

According to Ilia Baldine, manager of RENCI’s Network Research and Innovation Group, the new and previous NSF funding will be used to further develop the ORCA software framework so that it is easy to use and provides the stability, flexibility and assortment of tools needed to open up BEN to the network research community within the next year.

“Our goal will be to make ORCA a production system for creating and managing networking experiments on BEN by the summer of 2010,” Baldine said. “As part of this effort, we will enhance the architecture, develop user tools and new capabilities that will allow users to select appropriate resources and measurement capabilities within the network to include in their experiments.”

The GENI Spiral 2 awards were announced Oct. 12 by BBN Technolgies, the firm that manages the GENI initiative for the NSF.

For more on BEN, ORCA and GENI, see the RENCI feature story, Break this network.