GENI Deployment Plan
Five SPPs are being deployed within Internet 2 as part of NSF’s GENI initiative, and will be made available for use by the networking research community.
Systems will be deployed at five locations (Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Houston) and connected by gigabit links.
Some sites will have multiple links connecting them, as shown in Figure 1.
In addition to the direct links to other SPPs, each node will have several gigabit links to an Internet 2 IP router.
These interfaces will have IP addresses that are visible to any Internet 2 connected institution, allowing traffic from those institutions to reach the routers through the existing Internet 2 infrastructure.
While these IP connections support only best-effort services, because of the way Internet 2 is engineered, we expect congestion on the IP access paths through Internet 2 to be minimal.
To use the SPPs, users request slices through a controller called SPC-PLC at Washington University.
SPP-PLC runs the Planet Lab Central (PLC) software, providing users with access to SPPs using the same web interface that they use to access PlanetLab.
The SPPs will obtain slice configuration information from SPP-PLC and use it to setup accounts on individual SPPs that researchers can then use to login to SPPs so they can configure and run their experiments.
The deployment will take place in two stages.
The first stage (which is now complete) includes Salt Lake City, Kansas City and Washington D.C.
These will be connected in a ring, with a pair of gigabit links between each adjacent pair of nodes.
