Deploying on the FIRE facilities

Draft Agenda (Agenda on the conference site)

23 November 2009, 16:30 – 18:00

Background and rationale

To date several EC and national projects are offering and further deploying facilities for supporting research and experimentation for the future Internet. The so called FIRE cluster (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) in the past Future Internet Assemblies provided information and demonstrated the possibilities of using the FIRE facilities for research experimentation and testing.

For example at the FIA Madrid, the FIRE cluster collected use cases that illustrated how the facilities are being used or how potential users of the facilities intend or plan to use them. Likewise at the FIA Prague the FIRE cluster exhibited a number of facilities and provided live demonstrations of how these facilities can be used and what features were available.

In this context not only the main projects like Onelab2, PII, Federica, Wisebed and Vital++ should be seen, but also activities that fall in the area of the Living Labs and focus on the user experience and user driven innovation.

The logical evolution of the current state of affairs is to discuss directly with the potential users of the facilities in concrete terms how to deploy service platforms, services and applications on the available facilities. Thus the FIA Stockholm will be used by the FIRE facilities providers to discuss with the prospective users the details of “how to deploy on FIRE”.

Context

The FIRE experimental facilities let us explore whether Future Internet systems operating at scale exhibit the properties and behaviours that we intended when we designed them and tested in the lab, whether systems constructed independently can be integrated together and whether they function as we expect when they are integrated. If we are able to make facilities available for others to use we can also look for emergent properties and emergent usage of systems (e.g. creative use of facilities by users who discover different ways. A fuller treatment of the role of experimental facilities has been explored by the working group on modular federation of FIRE facilities.

1^st Specific focus on Trust and Identity

At the Prague FIA meeting some of the experimental approaches to Trust in Future Internet were explored. These can be broadly characterised as:

• Observing and monitoring attacks on systems in the public internet (e.g. Honeynets)
• Experimental work with ‘real’ end users (e.g. living labs)
• Provision of ‘trust services’ e.g. eID on which more trustworthy services can be constructed
• Experimental identification of technical vulnerabilities in systems

Provide quarantine areas of the testbed. There will be vulnerabilities at all levels in the systems and components of the future Internet. Can we create isolated (quarantined) experimental facilities in which one could run experiments that explore the robustness of systems and components against attack? For example, can we launch a distributed denial of service attacks on services without bringing down the whole FIRE facility or even worse impacting the entire internet?

Provide e-Identity facilities. Can FIRE provide a comprehensive electronic ID facility as a FIRE offering, so that it is used by all experimental activities using FIRE? How do FIRE users access and use such systems?

2^nd Specific focus on Software and Services

In support of some of the ongoing project in the area of services and software it is proposed to explore the installation and deployment of Open Nebula/Reservoir solutions for managing clouds onto of the current FIRE facilities. The intention is to explore the application of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud paradigm on the FIRE testbeds. This undertaking requires a discussion on how the Open Nebula/Reservoir stack can be deployed in some of the current FIRE facilities.

Scope

The current scope of FIRE covers:

• Facilities for experimentation and testing

Networking research – This is the main focus area of existing experimental and testing facilities. For example new protocols, new management schemes and new networking architectures can be deployed on existing facilities.

Service support research – This is an emerging capability of current offerings of the experimental and testing facilities. Ongoing work is providing flexible means to combine existing experimental networks with service provisioning and delivery platforms. Future general purpose service environments can equally be supported as cloud computing infrastructures.

• Experimentally driven research

This area provides research methodologies to support future research. As a rule future work should more strictly require experimental evidence and prototyping. Prototyping should come at the early stage of any project and should be used to foster collaboration between projects where applicable.

• User centred research (to a lesser extend)

This area can be supported through a tighter collaboration with the existing Living Labs to facilitate interdisciplinary research covering at least technical, usability and societal aspects.

Future directions

In the future and towards the Future Internet Initiative it is necessary to reinforce the roadmap of the FIRE facilities

• Federated, Open and Trusted platforms for the Future Internet by nature cut across all levels from network connectivity to high level services and user involvement
• Experimentation is key to discovery and validation throughout the research process
  • Component level, interworking, system level, …
  • Diversity, scalability, performance, …
  • Inter-disciplinary
• Starting from the offering of the prototypes, FIRE facility matures and evolves
  • to become more customer-friendly, e.g. through an intelligent portal, brokering support, one-stop shopping across facilities, provisioning of measurement tools
  • to go beyond the support of horizontal testing on one level towards vertical system-level testing from connectivity to service delivery platform level
  • to provide stable and sustainable services for the future Internet research community at large
  • to allow for experimentation in a socio-economic context with broad end-user involvement

Participation

Participation is encouraged by all experts involved in R&D projects having a requirements to deploy prototype algorithms, services, service platforms and applications in an experimental environment. Furthermore experts and managers defining the Future Internet Initiative are highly encouraged to participate in the session.