GENI Racks: InstaGENI Design and Deployment and Changes to the PlanetLab Networking Model

The National Science Foundations Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is an effort to build an environment for large-scale networking experimental research in novel network services and architectures. Deploying an environment to support these research activities requires a platform of sliceable, reservable compute and network resources that are deeply programmable, widely deployed, highly instrumented and directly accessible to end-users at many layers. The GENI Mesoscale deployment envisions a network of distributed clusters (“GENI racks”) running the OpenFlow framework and supporting the GENI AM API, an emerging standard for federation and interoperability. InstaGENI, a collaborative partnership effort of HP, Northwestern, Princeton, the University of Utah, and the Open Networking Institute, is one of the two funded GENI rack deployment efforts. InstaGENI features a lightweight, expandable cluster design featuring integration with the FlowVisor OpenFlow Aggregate Manager (FOAM), ProtoGENI and PlanetLab Aggregate Managers, and L2 connectivity to national research networks. InstaGENI racks will federate with existing Slice Authorities such as GPO GENI, ProtoGENI, and PlanetLab Central, enabling researchers in these communities to allocate resources across the InstaGENI deployment.