What Are We Working On Now?

• Expansion (2013/2014) The ONL Testbed will be expanded by adding 80 new machines. The new machines will be used to not only expand ONL but also to add Virtual Machine capabilities and to increase the number of routers available by introducing Software Routers.


• Cloud Computing (2009) The ONL Testbed will be extended to include 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.

What's New?

• If you encounter problems with the testbed or have requests, send email to testbed-ops AT arl.wustl.edu .
• 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.
• NPR Plugins (Spring 2009) We added new standard plugins to the NPR and NPR tutorial pages for these plugins. The most recent NPR plugins are from a family of plugins that allow plugins to be chained. For example, you can load plugins onto microengines 2, 3 and 4 which form a chain (or pipeline); i.e., the plugin on ME (microengine) 2 forwards meta-packets to ME 3; the plugin on ME 3 forwards to ME 4; and the plugin on ME 4 forwards to the Queue Manager.
  • shaper++: Shapes traffic using a token bucket.
  • delay++: Delays packets.
  • erd++: Implements Early Random Drop queue management.
  A number of helper functions augment the NPR ONL API functions making it easier to write plugins. Among these family of functions are the following features:
  • Outputting debug messages
  • Creating control message replies
  • A framework for forwarding meta-packets to blocks other than just the Queue Manager
  • A framework for forming plugin chains that pipeline meta-packets to the Queue Manager; e.g., traffic shaper, delay, queue management.
• Virtual Switches (March 2009) You can now add virtual switches that can connect together some number of hosts to form a subnet.
• Network Processor Routers (NPRs) (Summer 2008)
  14 new routers based on Intel's IXP network processors were added to the ONL testbed in early 2008 and used in the spring 2008 Advanced Architecture course taught by Patrick Crowley and the fall 2008 introductory networking course taught by Sergey Gorinsky. The routers are configured using an RLI that is conceptually the same as the one used for the NSP routers.
• 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.
• General Resource Description Framework (Spring 2008) Our new resource description framework allowed us to add support for the new Network Processor Routers (NPRs) in only two months in early 2008. Since then, we have been working on adding other components (e.g., NetFPGA, virtual switches).