The SPP Tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial page and The Hello GPE World Tutorial page are designed to give you simple, step-by-step usage examples that will allow you to get started quickly. They also contain links to a number of auxilliary pages that will allow you to try more complex examples. Two other wiki pages complete the tutorial: Using the IPv4 Metanet and Developing a New Metanet.

Do you have to read all four pages before using the SPPs? No. But you can't do much unless you read this page and The Hello GPE World Tutorial page. But these two pages (like the other two) are designed so that you can get hands-on experience by following the prescribed steps.

(Note: Scan the Internet Scale Overlay Hosting page if you have not already done so paying particular attention to the parts describing the role of the GPE (General-purpose Processing Engine) and the NPE (Network Processor Engine). Keep in mind that in a high-speed implementation, the SPP would be configured so that the NPE handled most data packets (the fastpath) leaving the GPE to handle control and exception packets (the slowpath).)

This page will walk you through the preliminary steps required to get setup to use an SPP; e.g., getting an SPP account and adding SPP nodes to your slice.

The Hello GPE World Tutorial will show you how to use the GPE to create a GPE-only prototype. It will show you how to get information about interfaces; how to create slowpath endpoints for communicating with a process running on a GPE; and how to make a resource reservation. It will show you how to write a simple packet-processing program that will run on a GPE. This program can be extended to create a GPE-only prototype of a simple metanet router.

By this point, you should be able to do simple SPP experiments that will help you develop your own GPE-only metanet router software. Although this GPE-only software can not take full advantage of the SPP because it doesn't use an NPE, most users will not be writing code for NPEs because programming an NPE requires knowledge about IXP network processor programming and the SPP substrate layer. In practice, we anticipate that most developers will write a GPE-only version of their metarouter and work with an advanced SPP developer to transform the performance-critical parts of their GPE-only code to run on the NPE. That is, most developers will write a GPE-only program which captures the logic of their metarouter and pass this design to an advanced SPP developer who will create a high-speed NPE-GPE version.

The IPv4 Metanet Tutorial describes how to use the IPv4 metanet code option which uses an NPE to forward IPv4 packets and a GPE to process packets terminating at the router (e.g., local delivery and exceptions). This page will walk you through an example of how to use the IPv4 metanet code option. It explains how to create fastpath endpoints, meta-interfaces, packet queues and IPv4 filters. You can directly use all of these concepts in developing your own metanet except for IPv4 filters. However, your code option will need to use filters to direct incoming packets to packet queues. Seeing how it is done for the IPv4 code option will give you a better understanding of how to design filters for your metarouter.

Developing a New Metanet walks you through an example of how to develop a simple code option. It shows you how to build a GPE-only metarouter for a simple protocol and discusses how that code might be transformed to use both an NPE and a GPE.

Requirements

This tutorial assumes that you will be using a Linux operating system and have access to standard Unix tools. In particular, you will need:

1. An environment where you can compile code for a Linux operating system
2. An OpenSSH executable
3. The latest version of Java to run some monitoring software and traffic generators

Compiling

You can use almost any Intel host running a recent version of Linux to compile code for the GPE. But if you think this is an issue, you can always try to match the version of Linux and glibc on a GPE. You can get this information after you ssh to a GPE (described later in The Hello GPE World Tutorial) by entering:

     uname -sr          # get version of Linux
     ldd --version      # get version of glibc

OpenSSH Executable

OpenSSH is a suite of open source utilities using the ssh protocol. Although you don't have to specifically use the OpenSSH suite, the tutorial examples assume that the ssh tools are from OpenSSH.

The Java Run-time Environment (JRE)

Most of the tutorial can be done without the JRE. But it will be helpful in the IPv4 Code Option Tutorial.

First, determine if you already have JRE 1.6.0 or higher. Enter the following in a command-line window: java -version. If the response says that you are already running some version that is atleast 1.6.0, you can skip this step.

If you need to install the JRE, go to the Java download page http://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp and download the latest JRE for your platform by following the instructions posted at the Sun site. Note: You only need to download the JRE (less than 20 MB), not the entire JDK (Java Development Kit).

MAC Users

Follow the instructions at Java Run-time Environment for the MAC OS.

Getting Started

You must get an SPP account before you can use the SPPs. The procedure is similar to the one used in PlanetLab except that SPP slices are administered through a special PLC (PlanetLab Central) site at http://drn06.arl.wustl.edu/. But the following PlanetLab procedure still holds:

• A Principle Investigator (PI) must create a slice for you.
• The PI must assign you to that slice.
• Then, you can add SPP nodes to your slice.

In a typical scenario, you (as an ordinary PlanetLab user) will use both normal PlanetLab nodes and SPP nodes. This requires that you get assigned both a normal PlanetLab slice and an SPP slice. Once you have been assigned to an SPP slice, you can log into the GPE of an SPP slice like any other PlanetLab node using ssh and develop a socket program as you would for any other PlanetLab node except for a few small differences:

• An SPP has multiple network interfaces if you want to use more than one interface.
• You must configure the SPP before you can use it.

The configuration process is fairly straightforward since a user typically customizes an existing configuration script to do the configuration.

Getting an SPP Account

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• Create RSA key-pair
  • already have one if you have a PlanetLab account
• Fill out registration form
  • email address important
  • site
  • roles
• When registration has been accepted and you are assigned to a slice
  • login
  • upload RSA key (sidebar "Users => My Account")

>>> What should PIs and Technical Leads do??? <<<