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: none Students: none August 27,2010, 2pm

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

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 3 Milestone & QSR Status IDMilestoneStatusOn Time?On Wiki? GPO signoff? S2.aSystem design issues for the GENI Information plane V1.0 Paper was deliveredOn time, to V.Thomas Waiting for BBN S2.bSystem design issues for the GENI Information plane V2.0 Due 9/30/10 QSR: 4Q2009 QSR: 1Q2010 QSR: 2Q2010 August 27, 2010

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 4 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 AUGUST 27, 2010

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 5 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 AUGUST 27, 2010

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 6 Issues Contracting: –Prior to submitting: 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 days. Issue 2: attending 3 GECs takes at least 9 days including travel, depending on location of the days Issue 3: Travel to a GEC and registration fee costs $ $2000 per trip, plus overhead, e.g approximately $ $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. AUGUST 27, 2010

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 7 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. AUGUST 27, 2010