Larry Peterson - US grants

There has been tremendous pressure over the last several years to push functionality from end hosts onto network routers. Whether one calls the resulting systems routers, application gateways, active networks,
proxies, or even topology-aware servers, a general trend was recognized: the logic that decides how to process packets has grown more and more complex over time. It is a contention that the potential
for this trend to continue is almost unlimited, which suggests the question: what are the important properties for routers in the next generation Internet? The projects answer is a new router architecture, which they
call a general purpose router (GPR), that supports arbitrarily complex forwarding logic. The GPR architecture has six unique features:

Performance: Provides the throughput required by the next generation Internet.

Extensible: Easily extended to support new forwarding functions without compromising performance.

Scalable: Scales to relatively large sizes, on the order of a hundred of Gbps ports.

Open: The hardware and software should be open so anyone can build or extend a router.

Commodity Components: Implemented using commercially available components.

Robustness: Robust enough to tolerate programming mistakes and malicious attacks.

The bottom line is that the project recognizes a need for routers to move from being closed, special-purpose network devices to being open, general-purpose computing/communication systems. The central challenge
in making this shift is to simultaneously support increasing complex forwarding logic and high performance, while using commercial hardware components and commercial operating systems. The GPR architecture
achieves this through two key innovations.

Better integration of the router's switching capacity and compute cycles. The project expects this to result in significantly better scaling properties, and an order of magnitude improvement in performance for packets that require only minimum processing cycles.

A hierarchy of paths through the router, ranging from fast/fixed paths implemented entirely in hardware to slow/programmable paths implemented entirely in software, but also including intermediate
paths that exploit the improved integration of cycles and switching.

In addition to implementing the GPR architecture---and solving the configuration, scheduling, and resource management problems that doing so will entail---the project will design and implement several novel
applications:

Edge routers that transition between different assumption regions of the Internet. Of particular note, the project will develop router functionality for deeply nested networks that include thin devices (e.g., embedded systems and low-power devices). The router needs to subsume some of the responsibility usually taken by the end node.

A scalable display system that consists of an array of parallel display processors (and associated frame buffers), each of which is responsible for some region of a wall-sized display. The router that
serves as a front-end to this array---i.e., connects it to a graphics source--must fragment packets containing graphics directives and forward each fragment to the correct processor.

An internal firewall that implements enclaves and protects hosts within a site from each other. Unlike a firewall that sits at the edge of a site, such a router must authenticate users, enforce access control, log usage, and implement intrusion detection.

EIA-0101247
David P. Dobkin
Princeton University

CISE Research Infrastructure: CISE Pervasive Computing: Applications and Systems

We are entering a new era in computing, the era of ubiquitous computing. In this world, our classrooms, labs, offices, and homes will be filled with a diverse collection of sensor, display and computing devices. Ubiquitous and pervasive displays will revolutionize the way we use computers.

In such an environment, the conventional view of the network as providing bit-pipes between clients and servers will no longer be appropriate. Many of the devices available in the environment will have limited computational capabilities and be connected by limited-capacity networks. So, we need an intelligent network that will be implemented by a collection of servers and programmable routers that overlay the physical network substrate.

The award is to build a research infrastructure consisting of three components. At the "edge" of the system, will be a variety of display technologies and sensors. At the "core'' of the system, will be an intelligent network using commodity PCs and emerging network processors. Underlying everything will be commodity wired and wireless
networks to provide connectivity among the edge devices and nodes in the intelligent network. This network will augment the CS Department's current network, which already includes both wired and wireless components.

This award will support approximately 15 students in attending the ACM HotNets-I Workshop being held in Princeton, NJ on October 28-29, 2002. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers in the networking and distributed systems community to debate emerging research directions.

Overlay networks have recently emerged as a promising technique for deploying new network services, and more generally, for introducing disruptive technology into the Internet. However, there is a pressing need for a testbed that allows the research community to experiment with overlay services at scale, and under real-world conditions. The proposed project will build-out and enhance a global overlay network, called PlanetLab, that provides just such a capability. Enhancements to be made to the PlanetLab software include the following:

-Implement system-level mechanisms that isolate experimental services from each other, and protect the network from faulty and malicious traffic;
-Build mechanisms to monitor the health of PlanetLab nodes and services, diagnose unexpected behavior, and map suspicious behavior to the responsible individuals;
-Provide mechanisms to allow researchers to discover the set of available PlanetLab nodes that meet their needs and acquire resources on those nodes according to a market that respects resource availability; and provide the instrumentation hooks and measurement tools needed to collect, archive, and analyze performance data collected on PlanetLab.

Broader Impact and Intellectual Merit: PI's envision PlanetLab serving as a microcosm for the next generation Internet. For the networking research community, PlanetLab offers the opportunity to regain the now-lost ability to rapidly and seamlessly move from idea to evaluation to practice. For the educational community, it offers a rich and realistic platform for teaching and experimentation, and a body of courseware and tools to support it. For the broader community of users, commercial developers, and society at large, it offers a path to re-energizing the innovative process that has led to new Internet services, widespread consumer adoption and generation of new economic and social value. This proposal aims to enhance the software substrate and build out the number of nodes in PlanetLab - a global overlay network that will serve as both a research testbed and a deployment platform. It can play a potentially momentous role in helping define a next generation (overlay) Internet by allowing researchers to experiment at scale and under real-world conditions.

Proposal Number: 0435087
PI: Larry Peterson
Institution: Princeton University
Title: Bootstrapping Broad-Coverage Network Services

Abstract:

This proposal explores the design and utility of two broad-coverage network services: (1) a topology discovery service that overlay nodes use to locate itself with respect to its peers and the endpoints it serves; and (2) an information service that collects, stores, propagates, aggregates, analyzes, and reacts to the network's changing conditions. The research challenge is to design these services to both provide Internet-scale coverage, and meet the needs of a rich collection of wide-area overlay networks and applications. We will deploy and demonstrate both services on PlanetLab. The impact of this work is to provide "foundational" services that can be leveraged to improve the robustness, security, performance, and manageability of the Internet.

Proposal Number: 0439886
PI: Jonathan Turner
Institution: Washington University

Proposal Number: 0440940
PI: Scott Shenker
Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Proposal Number: 0439642
PI: Thomas E. Anderson
Institution: University of Washington, Seattle

Proposal Number: 0439842
PI: Larry Peterson
Institution: Princeton University


Title: Collaborative Research: Virtual Networking - Enabling Innovation in Networks and Services

Abstract:

The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century, enabling greater access to information and providing new modes of communication among people and organizations. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core. In order
to free the global communications infrastructure from stagnation, the nation must find ways to enable its continuing renewal. This planning grant is developing a case for network virtualization as a means to enable innovation in networks and services. Virtualization allows multiple logically independent virtual networks to share a common physical infrastructure or substrate. This program is developing a plan for a major new research initiative in network virtualization that includes both basic research, the development of key technology components and the creation of an experimental testbed, to establish feasibility and provide a context in which networking researchers can develop innovative new network architectures and services. The program is articulating the case for network virtualization, soliciting input from the network research community and working with the community to develop recommendations to NSF for a major initiative in this area.

The proposed research program will develop and catalyze the core component of a next-generation Internet architecture that greatly increases the functional capabilities, robustness, flexibility, and heterogeneity of the Internet in the face of modern application requirements.

Our approach has two inter-related thrusts. The first is to address the following question: What is the right architecture for the next generation of global networking infrastructure? Because proposing a clean-slate design, or treating this question as a thought experiment, has little chance of practical impact, the second thrust is to build the research infrastructure that allows us to discover, evaluate and deploy this architecture.

Specifically, overlay networks have recently emerged as a promising technique for introducing disruptive technology into the Internet. This focus on overlay functionality has left unanswered the single most critical question: What lies underneath? What is the appropriate minimal, universally shared environment to underlay the overlays?

The core of an underlay that supports an increasing multiplicity of overlay opportunities lies in three key elements. First, there must be some means of information discovery and dissemination through with overlays learn about the underlying Internet; a so-called Information Plane. Second, elevating overlays to first-class objects places special emphasis on the coordinated assignment of complex collections of network resources (e.g., bandwidth, storage, computational cycles, shared information) to competing overlays in an economically coherent, computationally practical fashion. This requires an Economic Framework for resource allocation. Third, there is a complementary question of how to define the basic unit of resource, and the challenges in the implementation of decisions made in resource allocation by means of Virtualization. Combined, these elements form the critical core of an operating environment for overlays; the necessary universal substructure for an overlay-enabled world. These three elements play a pivotal role in this research program: they are both a key objective (output), and at the same time, essential for building a scalable wide-area testbed that allows researchers to evaluate new ideas under real-world conditions.

Abstract

Program: NSF 04-588 CISE Computing Research Infrastructure
Title: CRI: PlanetLab: A Community Resource Development Program
Proposal: CNS-0454278
PI: Larry L. Peterson
Institution: Princeton University

This community resource project will extend the PlanetLab testbed to approximately 1000 nodes at approximately 350 sites. PlanetLab is an overlay network providing an environment for both research innovation in network services and a platform for introducing new services to client communities. As a research testbed, PlanetLab provides a geographically distributed set of machines, a realistic network substrate that experiences conjestion, failures, and diverse behavior at links, and realistic workloads at client computers. As a deployment platform, PlanetLab provides researchers with a technology transfer path for services that have community support and provides users with access to these innovative new services. Users of PlanetLab are active in areas such as network architectures, measurement and modeling, content distribution, and education. Broader impacts of this project include enabling a wider community opportunities to engage in cutting edge networking research, extending the host sites to EPSCOR states, HBCU's, and liberal arts colleges; and engaging both industry and international participation in this effort.

The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century, enabling greater access to information and providing new modes of communication among people and organizations. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core. In order to free the global communications infrastructure from stagnation, the nation must find ways to enable its continuing renewal.

This planning project is aimed at creating a blueprint for a global experimental infrastructure needed to support a research program in network architectures and distributed systems. The goal of the research program combined with experimental infrastructure is to greatly increase the functional capabilities, robustness, flexibility, and heterogeneity of the global communications network in the face of modern application requirements, and a rich, competitive commercial environment. The key is to re-architect or re-invent the Internet to be more evolvable-to enable the research community to address the key challenges facing the Internet, and in the process, to build an Internet that is worthy of our society's trust.

Re-architecting the Internet would require substantial experimental infrastructure. The PIs propose to write a comprehensive plan to build this infrastructure. The proposal identifies the major architectural initiatives that address the challenges facing the Internet, outlines the empirical research process the community will use to pursue these initiatives, describes the experimental infrastructure needed to support this research, and highlights the process of putting in place a management structure for the large infrastructure.

We will soon enter an era of 10 GHz processors and 10 Gigabit networks, but will have no effective means of using that processing power to deliver that level of throughput for regular applications. This gap lays in the "service stack," which includes the application-level software, the operating system, and the networking code used by networked systems (Web servers, mail servers, caching Web proxy servers, Grid services, etc). Ideally, the performance of these systems would improve correspondingly with faster CPUs, but actual improvements may be significantly lower for a variety of reasons, including operating system limitations, slower improvements in disk performance, poor use of the CPU's features, etc. This work examines the service stack from the CPU's perspective to understand how the mismatches between it and modern processor features reduce delivered performance. The ultimate goal is to develop Grid/networking applications that scale with processor speed, and to make it easier for developers to improve performance.

Intellectual Merit: The principal investigators (PIs) focus on three areas:
1. Improving the tools for finding performance problems across boundaries, such as those between programs and the operating system, and between the operating system and the device drivers for the hardware;
2. Using these tools to reorganize the networking code in the operating system to optimize common cases; and
3. Developing a system that can automatically customize the operating system to be tailored for specific programs, without requiring the developer to manually modify the operating system's source code.

The main area of investigation will be what the PIs term cross-boundary problems, where two systems/layers that have no obvious flaws can perform poorly when used together. The performance problems generally stem from a mismatch of usage assumptions in the different layers. For example, Web servers using the "event-driven" design approach have shown exceptional performance and scalability on "static" content, such as regular files, and images. However, under such conditions, their design also requires the operating system to store a large amount of information about the program, and this information must be duplicated during certain processing steps when the server handles "dynamic" content, such as customized Web pages. This interaction causes their performance on dynamic content to drop, as the server gets busier. Other design assumptions in filesystems can cause all types of servers to unnecessarily block when searching for files, if other searches are in progress. This results in the CPU being underutilized for the duration of a disk access, which is a problem since CPU speeds have been growing faster than disk access times. As a result, the relative performance loss from this kind of problem will grow over time. Beyond developing a new network service stack that has higher performance and is designed to better utilize the CPU, the other focus of this work is examining the process of this kind of optimization.

Broader Impact: The PIs will use summer internships both to attract traditionally under-represented groups, but also to have developers the PIs can closely observe as they use the system. The focus of the internships will be either to optimize some open-source system, like the MySQL database or the Squid Web proxy server, or to expand the tools themselves. By using developers with various levels of expertise, the PIs can gauge how the tools can reveal the most promising areas for further investigation. The PIs can also incorporate the feedback from these experiments into the interface for using these tools, not only to increase interactivity, but also to help non-experts use them.

This project, evolving the Internet to address new threats, accommodating emerging applications and technologies, and fostering the spread of the network throughout the physical world, aims at developing a Virtualized Network Infrastructure (ViNI) responding to the many challenges faced by today's Internet. In 25 years, the Internet has moved from an obscure research facility, to a critical piece of the national communication infrastructure. To appreciate the significance of this transformation, recall that a bug in the Internet' core routing algorithm inconvenienced several thousands in 1989 and the SQL slammer attack in 2003 grounded commercial airline flights, brought down thousands of ATM machines, and caused damages of approximately $1 billion dollars. As our dependence on the Internet grows, so do both risks and opportunities. Hence, it is imperative that we address new threats, accommodate emerging applications and technologies, and foster the spread of the network throughout the physical work, precisely the goals addressed by this work. The instrument must meet the following requirements. ViNI must

-Provide realism through an experimental environment that reflects closely real-world conditions. -Experiments must have access to realistic network topologies, high-speed forwaring engines, real users, and high volumes of real traffic, and dedicated link bandwidth and node resources (CPU, memory, disk) allocated on relatively small time scales.
-Give experimenters control over their experiments by making it possible to replicate specific conditions for study. Researchers need tools to easily specify and start experiments, and to inject network events (e.g., failures, packet loss) in a predictable fashion.
-Be shared among multiple simultaneous experiments running on the same hardware. PlanetLab, the starting point of ViNI, supports multiple simultaneous experiments by running each in a virtual machine and its virtualization needs to be extended to support the goals and requirements of ViNI. Moreover, new resources, such as IP address blocks, must be globally managed.

Hence, to address the challenges that face the Internet today, this experimental infrastructure must reconcile these non-orthogonal requirements to maximize the value of the enabled networking research.
ViNI is envisioned serving as a microcosm for the next generation Internet.

The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and the CISE research community are planning an initiative called Global Environment for Networking Innovations or GENI to explore new networking capabilities that will advance science and stimulate innovation and economic growth. The GENI Initiative responds to an urgent and important challenge of the 21st Century to advance significantly the capabilities provided by networking and distributed system architectures.
To have significant impact, innovative research and design ideas must be implemented, deployed, and tested in realistic environments involving significant numbers of users and hosts. The initiative includes the deployment of a state-of-the-art, global experimental GENI Facility that will permit exploration and evaluation under realistic conditions. The GENI Facility will permit a range of researchers, including network engineers, policy analysts, protocol designers, system architects, and economic modelers to contribute to and study innovative new capabilities for the global network of the future. Assuming the concept proves to be as promising as currently anticipated, GENI construction will be considered for funding from NSF's MREFC account.

In support of making the case for GENI as a MREFC project, the PIs propose to undertake a set of tasks to advance the GENI project definition from the Conceptual Design, through the MREFC Readiness Stage, to Preliminary Design. This will involve addressing a set of design issues; taking the definition of various components of the facility to the next level of specificity; creating a detailed work breakdown structure (WBS), bottom up budget, schedule, contingency, and critical path analysis for each component and the facility as a whole; and taking the project management definition for construction and operation to the next level of specificity with due considerations to special requirements of GENI.

There is increasing demand among researchers and production system architects to combine (federate) compute, storage, and network resources from multiple sources (e.g., the organization?s own resources, their partners? resources, commercial and academic clouds, programmable network substrates). Various proprietary and experimental systems have taken the first steps to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of such federations, but substantial concerns remain about security, interoperability and management. In many ways, the situation resembles what emerging networks faced at the dawn of the Internet. Consolidation seems certain, but there is a lack the right architectural framework, where new models must contend with a quickly growing base of incompatible production systems. Against this backdrop, this workshop focuses on issues related to federating resources from multiple autonomous organizations into a seamless/ubiquitous resource pool, thereby giving users standard interfaces for accessing the widely distributed and diverse collection of resources they need. This workshop brings together leading network researchers and network research infrastructure developers to discuss specifics of federate (combine) compute, storage, and network resources from multiple sources. The concept for the workshop follows from multiple discussions in the GENI and FIRE initiatives to build federated network test-beds. The workshop expects to develop a common understanding of what it means for autonomous organizations to federate their resources into a seamless/ubiquitous resource pool.

Proposal #: 10-40123
PI(s): Peterson, Larry L.
Freedman, Michael J.; Pai, Vivek; Rexford, Jennifer
Institution: Princeton University
Title: MRI/Dev: Development of a Virtual Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Project Proposed:
This project, building VICCI, a programmable cloud-computing research testbed, enables a broad research agenda in the design of network systems that requires both multiple point-of-presence and significant processing/storage capabilities on the sites. VICCI, a distributed instrument with a point-of-presence at Princeton, GeorgiaTech, Stanford, and U Washington, along with international clusters in Europe and Japan, encompasses both a distributed set of virtualized compute clusters and networking hardware and the software that enables multiple researchers to innovate both at and above the infrastructure layer. It is designed to support research both into the design and deployment of large-scale distributed services that use an environment. VICCI enables research in
- Building block services (addressing issues of replication, consistency, fault-tolerance, scalable performance, object location, and migration) designed to be used by other cloud applications,
- Developing new cloud programming models designed for targeted application domains, and
- Studying cross-cutting issues at the foundation of the cloud?s design and how to build a trusted cloud platform that ensures confidentiality and integrity of computations that are outsourced to the cloud.
Plans include bootstrapping VICCI with working software from PlanetLab with an ultimate goal of folding the results into VICCI itself, thus creating an even more effective platform for research into scalable network systems.
Broader Impacts:
This project, strongly influenced by the experience with PlanetLab that has demonstrated the importance of deploying experimental network services on realistic platforms (i.e., platforms that are realistic enough to attract the real user community), provides a realistic environment to evaluate and deploy scalable new network services. VICCI supports deployment studies of prototype systems. Thus, it accelerates research and teaching processes by supporting seamless migration of scalable services and applications from early prototypes. Moreover, it offers a path to re-energize the innovative process that has led to new network services, widespread consumer adoption, and generation of new economic and social value. It also provides graduate students with extensive experience in building large-scale distributed systems and enables the design of more courses taking advantage of the instrument.

This project is supporting and extending the PlanetLab research testbed. PlanetLab is a 1000-node overlay network spanning 500 sites and 40+ countries world-wide. It is used to evaluate new network services (e.g., peer-to-peer networks, content distribution, scalable object location services, and adaptive routing overlays), as well as to observe Internet activity (e.g., network topology, routing dynamics, path latency and bandwidth, and failures properties). In supporting PlanetLab, this project is focused on enabling the research community to add diversity and scale to the set of available computing and communication resources. The project is also extending PlanetLab with improved instrumentation. Our approach is to leverage the data collection and analysis facilities currently used to operate PlanetLab to provide more value to PlanetLab users. There are two aspects to this. First, the project is making the raw data collected by all tools available for public download. Of course data can have multiple uses, and it seems likely that the same data used for operations may be of research value to the community. Second, the project is extending the instrumentation and related toolset to help users answer the kinds of questions they face when developing a widely distributed network service: "Is there something wrong with my service? If so, what is the cause, and how do I fix it?'' Having already made the investment to build a set of efficient data collection facilities and powerful analysis tools, the goal of the project is to see them solve as many problems as possible.

Abstract: This project will design a "Cloud Management System (CMS)" that provides a uniform way to acquire and control a wide range of resources from compute to storage to network, and from the data center to the network edge but do so at multiple levels of abstraction. The project will create a data model (a set of abstract objects, operations on those objects, and relationships among objects) that collectively defines how users interact with the underlying research cloud. The CMS unifies the underlying cloud resource substrate and presents widely different classes of users with customized projections and extensions of those resources.

The project will demonstrate the feasibility of the CMS by addressing the biggest risk to its success: defining a set of abstractions-in the form of an operational data model-that both (a) unifies the research cloud?s diverse hardware resources, and (b) supports widely different usage models. These abstractions form the heart of the CMS, but they must satisfy two competing objectives. On the one hand, the CMS provides a unified interface to a widely diverse set of compute and network resources, spanning many autonomous hosting sites, each with their own operational policies. On the other hand, thousands of users want to access the system in significantly different ways, ranging from traditional cloud users that just want a set of VM instances, to cloud researchers that want to create new cloud architectures.

Cloud Computing is rapidly changing the face of computing infrastructure and is a major economic driver in the technology sector. This project will benefit the cloud computing industry by informing the design of future cloud computing infrastructure and contributing prototype implementations to the Openstack community.