Supercharged PlanetLab Platform Architecture

This report describes the Supercharged Planetlab Platform (SPP), a system designed as a prototype of an internet-scale overlay hosting platform. Overlay networks have become an important vehicle for delivering Internet applications. Overlay network nodes are typically implemented using general purpose servers or clusters. The SPP offers a more integrated architecture, combining general-purpose servers with high performance Network Processor (NP) subsystems. SPP nodes have recently been deployed as part of the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) and are available for use by research users

The Open Network Laboratory (a resource for high performance networking research)

The Open Network Laboratory (ONL) is a remotely accessible network testbed designed to enable network researchers to conduct experiments using high performance routers and applications. ONL™s Remote Laboratory Interface (RLI) allows users to easily configure a network topology, initialize and modify the routers™ routing tables, packet classification tables and queuing parameters. It also enables users to add software plugins to the embedded processors available at each of the routers™ ports, enabling the introduction of new functionality. The routers provide a large number of built-in counters to track various aspects of system usage, and the RLI software makes these available through easy-to-use real-time charts. This allows researchers to expose what is happening fiunder the surfacefl enabling them to develop the insights needed to understand system behavior in complex situations and to deliver compelling demonstrations of their ideas in a realistic operating environment. This paper provides an overview of ONL, emphasizing how it can be used to carry out a wide range of networking experiments

Implementation of an Open Multi-Service Router

This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of an open, high-performance, dynamically reconfigurable Multi-Service Router (MSR) being developed at Washington University in St. Louis. This router provides an experimentation platform for research on protocols, router software, and hardware design, network management, quality of service and advanced applications. The MSR has been designed to be flexible, without sacrificing performance. It support gigabit links and uses a scalable architecture suitable for supporting hundreds or even thousands of links. The MSR\u27s flexibility makes it an ideal platform for experimental research on dynamically extensible networks that implement higher level functions in direct support of individual application sessions

The Design and Performance of a Pluggable Protocols Framework for Object Request Broker Middleware

To be an effective platform for performance-sensitive real-time and embedded applications, off-the-shelf CORBA middleware must preserve communication-layer quality of service (QoS) properties to applications end-to-end. However, the standard CORBA's GIOP/IIOP interoperability protocols are not well suited for applications that cannot tolerate the message footprint size, latency, and jitter associated with general-purpose messaging and transport protocols. It is essential, therefore, to develop standard pluggable protocols frameworks that allow custom messaging and transport protocols to be configured flexibly and used transparently by applications. This paper provides three contributions to research on pluggable protocols frameworks for performance-sensitive communication middleware. First, we outline the key design challenges faced by pluggable protocols developers. Second, we describe how TAO, our high-performance, real-time CORBAcompliant ORB, addresses these challenges in its plugg..

An Overview of the Real-time CORBA Specification

To be an effective platform for performance-sensitive real-time systems, distributed object computing middleware must support application quality of service (QoS) requirements end-toend. This article describes how the OMG's Real-time CORBA specification defines standard policies and mechanisms that permit the specification and enforcement of end-to-end QoS