As part of a GENI funded projects, UMD/MAX has been active in the development of several GENI related technologies focused in the area of GENI Aggregate Managers for Network Resources, Stitching Architecture and Computation Services, and GENI Enabled Software Defined Exchanges. UMD/MAX has developed the “MAX GENI Aggregate Manager (AM)” which is focused on providing GENI driven provisioning across network regions which are under control of either the DOE OSCARS system, or a Network Service Interface (NSI) compatible system. An instance of this MAX AM has been deployed on the MAX regional network to provide dynamic stitching access to the UMD/MAX InstaGENI rack.
UMD/MAX has also developed the GENI Stitching Computation Service (SCS). The SCS collects the resource information from all of the GENI Aggregates and constructs a GENI topology graph. The SCS then applies computation algorithms and other processing as needed to provide GENI topology computation results for user tools. This system allows GENI tools to expand user supplied high level requests into detailed workflow information which identifies all of the GENI Aggregates involved in a multi-aggregate stitching event. The UMD/MAX developed GENI based open source software is available here.
UMD/MAX has also developed a prototype GENI Enabled Software Defined Exchange which has been deployed on the Washington International Exchange (WIX). This is an exchange point in McLean Virginia jointly operated by Internet2 and MAX. For this prototype, the MAX Aggregate Manager and open source StackV system was modified to cover the WIX and also federate with other GENI available resources such as Internet2’s AL2S. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) direct connection is also leveraged to demonstrate the power of using GENI controlled SDXs to stitch GENI Slices to AWS Resources. The objective is to view the SDX as a centrally located peering point that provides a spectrum of services, including not only network connectivity but also compute and storage, through Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI). UMD/MAX is currently operating the production Stitching Computation Service (SCS) that continues serving the GENI community for years to come.
Additional information regarding the UMD/MAX GENI research and development activities are available here.
