Announcements

• Major Recent Developments
  • New RLI (Aug 31, 2009):
    • There is a single RLI for all router types: NPR (Network Processor Router) and NSP (Network Service Processor).
    • The RLI supports NetFPGA components.
    • The RLI experiment (configuration) file format has changed to an XML format.
  • NetFPGA (August 2009): The ONL testbed has six NetFPGAs. You can define your own customized NetFPGA unit and use it along with the NPR and NSP routers. You should view this feature as the ability to add in hardware modules to an experiment.
  • SIGCOMM Demo (August 2009): The SIGCOMM Demo has instructions on how you can run the demos and a poster. We hope to post a video soon.
  • NPR Plugins (Spring 2009) We added new standard plugins to the NPR. There are NPR tutorial pages describing these plugins and a new plugin chaining framework. For example, the following plugins can be easily chained together to form the packet processing sequence shaper++delay++erd++Queue:
    • shaper++: Shapes traffic using a token bucket.
    • delay++: Delays packets.
    • erd++: Implements Early Random Drop queue management.
  • Virtual Switches (March 2009) You can add virtual switches that can connect together some number of hosts to form a subnet.
  • Session Sharing (January 2009) A user can share his/her RLI session with an instructor; i.e., the instructor can see what the user is doing. Furthermore, a chat window allows communication between the user and the instructor.
• On-Going and Future Work
  • Cloud Computing Testbed (To Come) The ONL Testbed will be extended to include with 10 GbE switching and multicore servers with programmable 2x10 GbE NICs and the control software that will enable users to dynamically and flexibly assemble datacenter architectures and then to evaluate datacenter applications.
  • NetFPGA (Ongoing 2009) We continue to work on enhancing the NetFPGA environment. These features include greater integration into the ONL environment (e.g., monitoring data) and special modules (e.g., delay module).
  • Session Analysis (Ongoing 2009) The session analysis feature allows students to record their solutions and instructors to view both the solutions and a summary of the solutions. The hope is that we will be able to do some automatic scoring of solutions and provide shorter, improved feedback to students on class assignments.