Sponsored by the National Science Foundation

Design of an Information Substrate for Measurement, Monitoring and Inference

Spiral 2 Year-end Project Review

Institution: MIT

PI: Karen Sollins

Staff: noneStudents: none

August 27,2010, 2pm

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 2August 27, 2010, 2pm

Project Summary• Observations about management

– Measurement and monitoring are critical (not exclusively) to effective network management– Measurement and monitoring lead to information management– Measurement and monitoring require resources

• Computation• Storage• Communication• Others?

– Duplicate measurement and monitoring is wasteful– Longevity of information often important– Information may be about “something”, but may be multi-purpose

• Conclusion: an information substrate would make a valuable contribution to more effective network management

• Design criteria– Framework for saving information (including decisions about NOT saving)– Self-describing information for extensible (re)usability: typing (or ontology) and meta-data (e.g.

provenance)– Storage and access– Access control framework

• Work in 2 phases for Management Information Substrate– Architectural and design challenges– Design proposal

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 3August 27, 2010

Milestone & QSR Status

ID Milestone Status On Time? On Wiki?

GPO signoff?

S2.a System design issues for the GENI Information plane V1.0

Paper was delivered On time, email to V.Thomas

Waiting for BBN

Waiting for BBN

S2.b System design issues for the GENI Information plane V2.0

Due 9/30/10

QSR: 4Q2009

QSR: 1Q2010

QSR: 2Q2010

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 4AUGUST 27, 2010

Accomplishments 1: Advancing GENI Spiral 2 Goals

…and Management

• Continuous Experimentation– Effective management of supporting resources– Presentation of resource options– Provisioning prediction improvement

• Integration– Framework for integrating across management of sets of resources

• Instrumentation and Measurement– Example of management capabilities– Demonstrates lack of integration across layers

• Interoperability– Federation as key constraint/driver– Cooperation and coordination– Access restraints and control

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 5AUGUST 27, 2010

Accomplishments 2:Other Project Accomplishments

• Related funded research: a series of NSF grants, each to work on different aspects of the Knowledge Plane concept.– Previous grant: work on computational framework for widely distributed, multiple-domain

network management (2 PhDs, a number of papers)– Current grant: work on information substrate for widely distributed, multiple-domain network

management. (3 Master’s students in progress)– Paper published in ReArch, 2009 on an architecture for network management: overview

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 6AUGUST 27, 2010

Issues

• Contracting:– Prior to submitting: email with GENI office about the fact that the budgeting and expectations

were designed for large contracts and made no sense for small ones.• Issue 1: funding barely covers 1 month of PI time, which is 20-22 days.• Issue 2: attending 3 GECs takes at least 9 days including travel, depending on location of the 20-22 days• Issue 3: Travel to a GEC and registration fee costs $1500 - $2000 per trip, plus overhead, e.g approximately $2700 - $3600

per trip, so aproximately $9,000 of the $30,000 total• Conclusion: attending 3 GECs per year leaves the PI with about 1/3 less money to pay for time and uses more than one third of

the original time, thus leaving the PI with approximately 5-6 of paid days to do the work.• Consensus: 1 trip per year.

– This was discussed and understood prior to the GENI Spiral 2 submissions were due– When the contract came through, all had been forgotten and took MANY discussions to make

some sense out of this – just about travel to GECs!– Conclusion: there is little institutional memory about things like this, which make for significant

amount of wasted time and work in repeating them

• Timeliness– Original start date, intended for Oct. 1, 2009– Many, slow rounds, first to reach an understanding and then to get it consistently into the

contract.– Result: contract for 1 year was signed on April 20, 2010 to end Sept. 30, 2010, ostensibly for a

year’s worth of work.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 7AUGUST 27, 2010

Plans

• Plans for the remainder of Spiral 2:– Complete final version of the architectural challenges paper: Sept. 30, 2011– Write first draft of design paper, target date of May 30, 2012– Write final version of design paper: Sept. 30, 2012

• Looking toward Spiral 3– Requirement for an architected approach to the combined problems for layering (appropriately)

and federation: critically important and happening– A coherent and architected framework for multi-layer, federated management is critical to

keeping an infrastructure such as GENI both operating and evolving: critically important, not happening

– Given the funding model (and my experience with contracting) it would be impossible for me to propose this in the GENI framework

• I do not have other funding to build something like this• I do not have a “team” in place who could do this• GENI seems dependent on people building elements of the system, who only need supplemental money to do the work,

because they already have other sources of funding using only supplemental funding• I am happy to review, advise, etc. on this subject• I am willing to attend GECs with travel support from BBN.