"Our clear target is always
to build a bigger and better Internet."
Dave Ward,
SVP, CTO and Chief Architect, Engineering
"Imagining the future is
not enough. We have to build it."
Kristen Wright,
Director, Research & Open Innovation
Perspective Piece by Monique Morrow
May 2016—Yale University | New Haven, Connecticut
I had a chance recently to speak with an astute group of global undergraduates who are students participating the Ethical Business class at Yale University taught by the energetic Professor Vikram Mansharamani. Professor Mansharamani regularly invites industry leaders to this course to dialogue with students on top-of-mind global issues. I was asked to speak to the class in April about gender equality in global organizations—something I am quite passionate about.
This course is a special endowment to teach ethics at an undergraduate level; it is one of the most over-subscribed courses at Yale. Students in this course represent a diverse group of incredibly gifted minds from varied ethnic backgrounds and areas of study. Many of them, like Nasos from Greece, have exceptional stories about how they are changing the world for the better.
When Professor Mansharamani reached out to me, he asked me to frame up one key question to students: What does it look like to accelerate cultural change, specifically on the topic of gender equality?
For some time, I have been spearheading the “Internet of Women” global collaborative movement with a goal to develop a new social science for women in technology to sustainably transform this industry together. Through my widespread research and work on this topic, I’ve discovered some really salient themes that I wanted to share with the students:
I gave the class some required pre-reading and was quite excited to get in a room and facilitate this discussion. I was not disappointed. The topic was so hot that several students stayed on through the lunch hour to continue sharing ideas as we dialogued about the challenges and opportunities that exist regarding gender equality in organizations.
During the class, students gathered for about thirty minutes to come up with a list of ideas they thought would really help organizations gain meaningful momentum regarding the issue of gender equality. Here are some of the highlights:
1. Educate People Across the Industry
Host company-wide talks about the commitment towards diversity. Create an “Industry Manifesto” stating core values on this topic of gender diversity and showcasing examples of programs. For example, consider the rise of initiatives like “Green,” “Climate Control.” Now we must turn our attention to more humanistic values, with goal to attain 50/50 parity and gender-neutral enterprises.
2. Reward the Desired Behaviors
Affirm commitment to diversity through support from senior leadership and rewards programs. Through “gamification-type” programs, create a rewards system that leads people toward building the behaviors and habits we want to see manifested in service of gender equality. Ideas flowed from the class! One suggestion was a "pinterest-like" badge program with special bonuses for organizational social responsibility to others, specifically around inclusion. Another idea was to simplify structural challenges and relieve organizational pressure by offering bonuses to people who actually take time off (e.g family leave) to celebrate life-changing events (like a new baby in family).
3. Improve Data, Metrics, and Analysis for a Clearer View of the Issue
Many of the students discovered, through their readings and research, that the data being collected around the issue of gender inequality is often antidotal, largely qualitative, and often representative of only a small subset of the current landscape. Recommendations for taking a closer look at how we’re measuring, monitoring, and understanding the widespread situation surfaced as a way for organizations to truly become better-equipped to move into a future of gender parity in the industry with increased agility.
4. Implement Formal Mentorship and Sponsorship Programs
The over-mentoring and under-sponsoring of women in the industry is a significant piece of the problem regarding gender parity. Formal mentorship and sponsorship programs would begin to address this imbalance in a regimented manner that can be tracked, analyzed, and optimized over time.
Several of the students really stood out to me. The conversations from these young minds were impassioned and thought-provoking, as well as actionable. Overall, the experience was valuable and empowering for all parties—Professor Mansharamani sent me a note of gratitude following the class, expressing the positive impact the dialogue on his students. I remain grateful to have had the opportunity to engage some of the top minds from across the globe and motivate them to collaborate toward action as we work toward a better tomorrow for gender equality in organizations and across industries.
Paris, FR—05 May 2016
Paris and the broader French community are helping lead the way as Cisco continues to “re-invent” the Internet. The Paris Innovation Research Lab (PIRL) is a special space designed to enable collaborative innovation in an entirely programmable environment. The lab is focused on a few key areas of digitization that are set to rock the landscape through Information-Centric Networking (ICN), including IPv6, IoT Big Data Analytics, and Deep Learning.
PIRL is especially focused on applying advances in these areas to the concept and evolution of smart cities.
Through their work in the Paris Innovation Research Lab, the team is creating an underlying infrastructure to enable a common platform upon which developers can build and deploy applications to make life easier for all citizens.
Together with a team of research partners (from interns to PhDs), universities like Ecole Polytechnique, and the NUMA Accelerator, PIRL is forging the way for innovation at the heart of IoT and smart cities.
Check out the video to learn more about what the team is working on in Paris!
April 2016—San Jose, CA
FD.io community members from twenty different organizations gathered earlier this month in San Jose, California to participate in the first FD.io /dev/boot training and hackfest event. Instructors delved into the VPP code to bring data plane developers up to speed on some of the most critical parts of VPP data plane code in order to better enable participants to build, test, deploy, and contribute to the VPP codebase. Check out the replay here!
Following three days of training, participants split into small groups to discuss potential projects, collaborations, and contributions they’d like to make to FD.io, as part of the “hackfest” component of the /dev/boot event. Topics and ideas discussed included ODP input and output modules, CLI editing/history and dashboard, improved error logging, policing/scheduling algorithms, just to name a few. Some of the latest projects added under the FD.io umbrella include Continuous System Integration Test (CSIT), Honeycomb, NSH SFC, and Overlay Network Engine.
Since its launch in February 2016, the FD.io project has seen tremendous growth, with 800+ commits made by 70+ contributors representing 249,798 lines of code. The FD.io Project provides an IO services framework for the next wave of network and storage software that is modular, extensible user space IO services framework that supports rapid development of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services. FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic. FD.io provides an out-of-the-box programmable vSwitch/vRouter. VPP runs in user space on multiple architectures, including x86, ARM, and Power and is deployed on various platforms including x86 servers and embedded devices. (source: https://www.openhub.net/p/fdio)
To get involved or learn more about FD.io and VPP:
19-23 January 2016—Shenzhen, China
The results are in—Shenzhen OpenDaylight (ODL) /dev/boot hackathon projects have been presented, weighed, and measured… and the winners named (more on that in a moment)! Last month in Shenzhen, Cisco partnered with Tencent to deliver the second-ever China ODL Bootcamp through the /dev/boot program.
Following an excellent China ODL Summit on Technology and Practice (sponsored by Cisco) on Monday in Shenzhen, a select group of university students and industry professionals brought their enthusiasm and competitive prowess to Shenzhen University, where our very own Cisco instructor and expert coaches spent a week with the group of forty-five participants—imparting knowledge and skills around the OpenDaylight platform.
Tuesday morning opened the week with a series of inspirational, context-setting talks from industry executives Marty Ma (Senior Director, Tencent), Neela Jacques (Executive Director, OpenDaylight), Ning Liu (Director, Baidu), Ming Zhou (Senior Director, Cisco). ODL Executive Director Neela Jacques encouraged participants to dive in, telling the eager audience,
"You are here because you are leaders worth investing in. You have the opportunity to use the knowledge and skills you learn this week to create a major impact as you continue to practice and contribute back to the ODL community. The code you share will help people and technology grow far beyond the community here in China."
After the opening keynotes, the participants were off and learning, digging into our instructor's OpenDaylight lessons and hands-on labs. On Wednesday afternoon, the /dev/boot hackathon teams began to design their projects for the “hack” portion of the week, which they ran by the expert coaches for guidance and approval Thursday morning.
/dev/boot attendees joined from fourteen companies across the region (including Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, China Unicom, China Telecom) and from sixteen regional universities to learn, apply, and compete for the ODL/dev/boot hackathon victory!
The fifteen Shenzhen /dev/boot hackathon projects focused on application of the ODL skills the teams had learned throughout the first three and a half days of the program; you can check out the full list below. Teams posted their Powerpoint presentations and final code from the /dev/boot hackathon competition to our brand new Cisco /dev/boot community—you can see the original submissions of the projects, and even leave comments for the teams here!
The hackathon teams worked into the early hours of the morning and persisted straight through until submitting their work for the morning deadline on the final day of the bootcamp. Our expert judges heard each team's presentation, reviewed code, watched demos, asked questions and had a tough decision to make when all the teams had finished. Congratulations to all the teams, and special congrats to our winners!
After intense deliberation, the top three teams emerged as our Shenzhen 2016 ODL /dev/boot Champions:
| FIRST PLACE: TEAM 2 | SECOND PLACE: TEAM 10 | THIRD PLACE: TEAM 4 |
|---|---|---|
|
ACL as a Service  Peng Zhang (Beijing Institute of China Telecom), Wenyao Huang (Shenzhen University), Hongli Zhou (Industry Innovation Center for Future Network) |
Application Traffic Live Assurance System  Lei Wang (Tsinghua University: Shenzhen), Aijun Wang (Beijing Institute of China Telecom), Jing Liu (Tencent) |
Port-Based NAT Using OpenFlow  Gang Zhao (Baidu), Xiao Lin (Tongji University), Zhilan Huang (Guangzhou Institute of China Telecom) |
Check out the full Project List and read more about the Shenzhen ODL /dev/boot hackathon projects below!
| Team | Team Members | Project Name | Project Description | Github Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chen Zhang, Zhongping Dong, Kun Huang |
FlowCleaner |
Traffic redirect to flow cleaning node and transparently sent back to data center if safe |
|
| 2 | Peng Zhang, Wenyao Huang, Hongli Zhou |
ACL as a Service |
Enable OTT providers to set policy in carrier networks |
|
| 3 | Qingxiang Gong, Xiaotao Deng, Shaoguang Yang |
Service-based Forwarding |
Reserve high bandwith paths for high-priority service by pre-provisioning flow entries to put high-priority traffic on high-bandwidth flows |
|
| 4 | Gang Zhao, Xiao Lin, Zhilan Huang |
Port-based NAT using OpenFlow (Distributed NAT) |
Implementing a distributed port-based NAT using OpenFlow. Implemented as an external application in Python plus a component inside ODL to detect new flows. |
|
| 5 | Jianwei Mao, Feng Liao, Fanka Li |
Load Balancing based on ODL |
Reduce high utilization of links and shift traffic to underutilized links in order to give all users good video experience by avoiding link congestion |
|
| 6 | Dongbo Gu, Jie Li, Guoyou Sun |
SDN Load Balancer |
Create a less expensive load-balancer, given that servers can't support enough clients - so deploy more servers and then have to spread clients over those servers. |
|
| 7 | Lu Wang, Shuolin Deng, Lei Zheng |
Route Distribution Auditing & Route Leak Prevention |
Route distribution auditing between autonomous systems (proactive auditing of routes) |
|
| 8 | Zhaozhong Xiong, Wenying Dong, Xurong Yang |
Implementation of Service Chain Based on OpenFlow |
Enabling network function virtualization by using openflow service chains |
|
| 9 | Weinming Yu, Chen Su, Yongjie Wang |
Live Network Upgrades |
Allow the operator to choose node for upgrading and then provision that alternative path to reroute traffic during upgrades in order to avoid temporarily breaking the network |
|
| 10 | Lei Wang, Aijun Wang, Jing Liu |
Application Traffic Live Assurance System (ATLAS) |
Application-aware traffic engineering in SP backbone |
|
| 11 | Siyu Yan, Ye Tian, Bo Zhu |
Intelligent Stream Media Accelerator |
Build proactive method external application to provide tiered network resources for users of different priority levels |
|
| 12 | Shuai Yang, Chao Pei, Xiangwu Lai |
OpenFlow SDN DDOS (Scrubbing and Redirect) |
Carrier networks have many DDOS servers—use OpenFlow and RESTCONF to scrub and reroute in order to be able to load-balance across multiple DDOS servers |
|
| 13 | Junxiao Wang, Feng Guo, Qiwei Hu |
Openflow Fast Link Protection |
Increase network resiliency in the face of failure by skipping return to controller to increase speed convergence (recovery after failure) |
|
| 14 | Yushu Zhao, Yuqiang Chen, Keyin Li |
ODL Trace Route |
Verify correct network operation and/or diagnose network failure |
|
| 15 | Mian Dai, Baohong Lin, Wenqiang Jin |
Black Balance |
Blacklisting proactively by IP address and load-balancing flows reactively by forwarding packets to the controller (Optimal Solution for filtering and prioritizing through a network) |
The /dev/boot action learning program is Cisco’s newest Open Innovation initiative focused on driving next generation context, skills, and co-innovation across the industry.
Learn more at /dev/boot Program page on the Cisco Research & Open Innovation Center website or follow our community for regular updates or to join the conversation and coding!
To engage with us, leave a comment below or start a discussion here in the community. We'd love to hear from you.
16 Feb 2016—Berlin, Germany
This week at Cisco Live! Berlin, Cisco’s Research & Open Innovation team spotlighted the importance Open Source projects and communities by running an OpenDaylight (ODL) Newcomer Training in the DevNet Zone.
Customers, partners, and Cisco employees came together for an introductory training, aimed at building understanding, seeing ODL in action, and learning about ODL from an expert developer.
Stemming from the /dev/boot Program, this ODL Newcomer Training aims to provide the tools, resources, and expert support necessary to usher in the new paradigm of open source as common practice in the industry.
Stay tuned for more ODL events in the future, and check out DevNet for developer resources and upcoming events!
Last week at Princeton University, forty of the industry’s top SDN developers, network architects, and students came together to lift the game of open SDN co-development in the first North American ODL /dev/boot.
Participants from AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Cisco joined forces with students and professors from Boston University, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and Rutgers to dive deep into ODL architecture, use cases, and code. “We all brought our best coders and architects, our brightest ideas, and our biggest problems; and we tackled them together,” says Kristen Wright, Director, Cisco Research & Open Innovation, “Couple that with some of academia’s brightest young minds—and magic happens.”
The /dev/boot action learning event included architecture deep-dives, training, labs, and design sessions; and culminated in a 2.5-day “hack-a-thon” in which participants teamed up to co-develop ODL features, infrastructure modifications, and applications that were deemed top business priorities. “Only in open source can users become an integral part of their own feature development. All of these projects produced usable and useful code,” says Jan Medved, Distinguished Engineer in Cisco’s Chief Technology & Architecture Office.
Cisco expects several of the projects from /dev/boot to land in the open source community.
Cisco has held other /dev/boot events in Beijing, and at HackZurich; and will continue to shepherd this new Open Innovation trend around the world. Interested in /dev/boot? Contact devboot@cisco.com. Also check out our GitHub repository for a closer look at this cohort’s /dev/boot projects.
(L to R) Kevin Boutarel, Mike Kowal, Yueping Zhang, Oleg Berzin (not pictured)
FIRST PLACE WINNER
The first place winners were Kevin Boutarel (Princeton University), Oleg Berzin (Verizon), Mike Kowal (Cisco), Yueping Zhang (Verizon) for their demonstration of ODL capabilities for programmatic control of flows in the network using BGP flow-spec or BGP v4. Check it out on GitHub.
INFRASTRUCTURE INNOVATION AWARD
Dave Stilwell (AT&T) and Dan Timoney (AT&T) were honored with the Infrastructure Innovation award for providing the ability to redirect requests in a cluster to the shard leader. Check it out on GitHub.
(L to R) Dave Stilwell & Dan Timoney
(L to R) Stas Isakov, Mark Barrasso, Larry Zhou
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AWARD
Mark Barrasso (Boston University), Stas Isakov (Cisco), and Larry Zhou (AT&T) took home the Entrepreneurship award for their innovative, user-friendly, and utilitarian IoT application for realtime tracking of snow plows and weather updates. Check it out on GitHub.
DESIGN & CODE AWARD
Tuan Duong (AT&T), Jill Jermyn (Columbia University), and Suja Srinivasan (Rutgers University) won the Design & Code award for their creative and well-thought-out modification of the method for attaching BGP community values to routes. Check it out on GitHub.
(L to R) Jill Jermyn, Suja Srinivasan, Tuan Duong
(Alphabetical by Project Name)
| Project | Goal | Project Team | GitHub Repository |
|---|---|---|---|
BGP Communities |
SDN-controlled method for attaching community values to routes Traditional Method: Configure prefix list and match policies to set Community Values to Routes. Problem: Need different policy configuration on every router. This Experiment: Divert the Route Reflection Path to pass through SDN Controller. SDN Controller attaches the Community Values to Routes. |
Tuan Duong (AT&T), Jill Jermyn (Columbia University), and Suja Srinivasan (Rutgers University) |
See Github |
Backup & Restore |
Export / Import MD-SAL config tree (or part of it) to and from an external file, for use in:
|
Rich Tabedzki (AT&T), Stan Bonev (AT&T) |
See Github |
Config/Operational "Cache" |
Cache NETCONF data (config & operational) in the controller to avoid time costs of fetching it from the network each time |
Om Prakash (AT&T) |
See Github |
DDoS Mitigation |
Mitigation of a simple DDoS attack using ODL |
Pavan Kulkarni (Rutgers), Krishnaveni Bujaranpally (Rutgers), Priya Loke (Rutgers), Srinath Dontula (AT&T) |
See Github |
Flow-Spec (SDN Remote Blackhole) |
Demonstrating ODL capabilities for programatic control of flows in the network using BGP flowspec or BGP v4. |
Kevin Boutarel (Princeton University), Oleg Berzin (Verizon), Mike Kowal (Cisco), Yueping Zhang (Verizon) |
See Github |
KAFKA OFP |
odl-kafka-plugin is a northbound plugin that allows real-time (or near-real-time) event or telemetry data to stream into a big-data platform such as PaNDA. The key design goal of this plugin is to provide a generic and configurable data connector that subscribes to southbound event source(s) via ODL's Event Topic Broker (ETB) on one side, and forward notifications to a Kafka endpoint. |
Craig Riecke (Cornell), Lee Sattler (Verizon), Wuyang Zhang (Rutgers) |
See Github |
NB Cluster Redirect |
Provide the ability to redirect requests in a cluster to the shard leader |
Dave Stilwell (AT&T), Dan Timoney (AT&T) |
See Github |
NETCONF "1.0" |
Communication with network elements that support Netconf, but not Yang |
Bruce Brandon (AT&T), Omair Fatmir (AT&T), Lynn Rivera (AT&T) |
See Github |
Snow Plow IoT |
IoTDM application to monitor/alert road conditions with real¬time tracking of snow plows and weather updates |
Mark Barrasso (Boston University), Stas Isakov (Cisco), and Larry Zhou (AT&T) |
See Github |
Kristen Wright (Cisco)
October 14-16 marked the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Held in Houston, Texas, it was packed with cool sessions and strong women who are passionate, witty, and experts in their fields.
Among those women is a small contingent of hard-core supercomputing experts from our national laboratories. One of their themes this week has been open source, and they had some really interesting things to say!
Robin Goldstone—a computer scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)—talked about the evolution of supercomputing at LLNL, and about their plans to build a next-gen 150 petaFLOP HPC cluster—Sierra. (That’s 150x10^15 floating point operations per second.) Sierra is what LLNL calls an “Advanced Technology System” (ATS)—a vendor-supported supercomputer designed to run a single, very large problem.
Robin also discussed some of the challenges of taking HPC ATS systems to the next level, which is exascale computing. Power will be one major challenge. “We could build an exascale system today, but it would consume around 100 megawatts of power.” Lawrence Livermore, along with the other national laboratories, is working closely with computer vendors to improve the power efficiency of future HPC systems. The integration of accelerators, such as GPUs, has also been difficult to date due to their segregation from rest of the compute architecture, Robin stated, but that Sierra will utilize some of the new GPU advances from NVIDIA, in which the accelerators are much more tightly coupled with the CPU. IBM and NVIDIA will be LLNL’s development partners for this next-gen ATS system.
Robin and team also manage “Capacity Computing Systems.” These are open source clusters that run the majority of the LLNL workloads, and are running the LLNL homegrown HPC software stack, CHAOS (Clustered High Availability Operating System). CHAOS has given the LLNL sysadmins a way to manage multiple Linux clusters on mostly-commodity compute with efficiency, reliability, and speed. In short, LLNL developers have enhanced Red Hat Enterprise Linux to better support HPC. They have integrated the Lustre open source high-performance file system and InfiniBand interconnect, created new packages for cluster management & monitoring, and they regularly contribute their kernel patches and other HPC software back to the open source community. They also developed SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) for fault-tolerant, highly scalable resource management and job scheduling.
You can read more about CHAOS here: https://computing.llnl.gov/LCdocs/chaos/, and LLNL just announced a subcontract award to Penguin Computing to provide 7 Petaflops (quadrillion floating operations per second) of “capacity” computing capability to Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. (Read the article: http://nnsa.energy.gov/mediaroom/pressreleases/nnsa-announces-procurement-penguin-computing-clusters-support-stockpile)
Continuous Integration (CI), as a named practice, originated with the work of Grady Booch in the early 90s, and has largely been adopted and evolved out of the Agile and Extreme Programming methodologies of the past 25 years or so. Agile CI in supercomputing may sound like an oxymoron, but Sreeranjani (Jini) Ramprakash—UX specialist / team lead from the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF)—dispelled that myth for us this week.
Jini and a few colleagues from other ALCF groups found they were able to form a natural bridge between their teams to bring together several crosscutting projects. They all have “day jobs,” but have organically grown an awesome CI subculture, which is helping their groups to be more efficient, effective, and connected.
It all started with a small group adopting Jenkins—a cross-platform, continuous integration and continuous delivery application—for their business intelligence needs, including setting up an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) solution. Word started spreading that developers were able to do more of “the fun stuff” because they were spending less time debugging, trying to keep the code base salient, and server-hopping to diagnose problems from an endless number of log files. Instead, they were pipelining their build and test processes, automating test & deployment, and just generally making the build-test-deploy cycle easier for developers.
What happened next was interesting. Developers on other projects began asking for “exceptions” to use the externally hosted CI tools for other projects and purposes. Word spread, and the ALCF management team decided that the exception should be the rule. Hosting their own Jenkins instance would allow CI to expand organically, and would help them avoid some of the authorization and access backlogs they were facing due to the large number of mounting exceptions—a win-win.
Once the ALCF launched their in-house Jenkins instance, CI spread like wildfire within the facility. As any good engineer would do, Jini began trying to quantify the benefits. What she discovered was that, by participating in this internal open CI community, ALCF developers were helping each other more, projects were more connected, and CI adopters were reporting extreme productivity gains.
Jini attributed the dramatic interest in CI not only to productivity benefits, but also to the developer experience. “It was so much easier for developers. They just started using it more and more,” she said. “An unpredicted benefit was the degree to which it has helped our teams to slice through organizational silos with cross functional teams. They just naturally work together.”
As a member of the Advanced Technologies Office within the Livermore Computing supercomputer center, Robin is involved in developing LLNL's High Performance Computing (HPC) strategy. Focus areas include commodity HPC clusters, architectures for data intensive computing, energy efficiency and Exascale systems.
Sreeranjani (Jini) Ramprakash is the User Experience Specialist/Team Lead at Argonne National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility, which operates a supercomputer in support of high-impact scientific research.
She leads a team of analysts supporting researchers worldwide. She also helped develop business intelligence systems by modeling data and building software to streamline reporting.
Passionate about engaging girls in STEM activities, she volunteers for Systers, mentors for Google Summer of Code and helps organize Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day at Argonne.
She has a master’s degree from UT Arlington and a bachelor’s degree from Mangalore University, both in Computer Science and Engineering.
Other great HPC and supercomputing sessions included Oak Ridge’s Veronica Vergara Larrea talking about Jenkins monitoring, and Suzanne Parete-Koon’s “Tiny Titans” talk on Parallel Computing with DIY Supercomputers & Games. Gennette Gill, from D.E. Shaw Research, also talked about the Anton Management System, which her team developed in order to address the unique UI and management challenges in a multi-user supercomputing environment.
I was delighted to see this much female supercomputing power at Grace Hopper, and so enjoyed meeting these super-women. I hope their talks have inspired some of the young talent from Grace Hopper to pursue careers in high-performance computing.
Cisco’s UCS platform is extremely well-suited for what we call “balanced technical computing”—that is, classes of problems which gain the most advantage from a balanced approach to CPU, memory, and I/O “power.” A few examples of this are elliptic curve cryptography, bio-informatics, financial services, data warehousing/mining/search engines, and cloud computing.
The Cisco UCS team has been piloting a production-class balanced technical Computation-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering that has provided many of Cisco’s researchers a high-availability platform on which to solve some pretty interesting real-world problems. (See the research & pub list below)
Cisco’s Arcetri cluster—the brainchild of Claudio DeSanti (Cisco Fellow) and Landon Curt Noll (Claudio’s “Resident Astronomer”)—was named after the world-renowned Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in the outskirts of Florence, Italy. The cluster’s beauty lies within its heterogeneity (meaning it can leverage a variety of UCS gear – old, repurposed, and new), its balanced computing performance, low latency/high throughput/predictability, and its ultra-high manageability using Cisco’s powerful UCS Manager toolkit and APIs. Claudio’s team has also incorporated an adaptive computing Moab/TORQUE resource scheduler, and Charm++ computation via Ultra Low Latency Ethernet (usNIC).
Research Impact – List of publications (Year 1)
Conference papers:
Research Impact – List of publications (Year 2) Journal articles:
Conference papers:
Internet Data Analytics allows researchers and engineers to focus on analytics by making data collection and presentation simple and efficient. Internet Data Analytics brings several emerging IP technologies together on a modern software development platform, with rich APIs that open the doors to endless applications for operations, design, engineering, and research.
Routers use Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange network reachability information. This information has been the subject of academic research since the beginning of the Internet.
Historically, researchers have collected BGP data by directly peering from BGP routers (or vRouters) in their labs to routers participating in the Internet BGP routing exchange. This approach is less than ideal, because it requires manual configuration, and because access to data is typically limited to ASCII or MRT-formatted text files, which can become cumbersome as data sets grow.
A more fundamental challenge with historical collection methods is that using a one-to-one collection method (one BGP session per routing data source) makes it difficult to increase the number of collection points without adding significant management burden to network operators.
Internet Data Analytics reduces these operational challenges significantly by efficiently collecting BGP & IGP data from multiple sources, in a one-to-many fashion, without requiring BGP peering. This allows researchers to focus more energy on the data, itself, and less on its collection and interpretation.
Internet Data Analytics is built upon the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP), in which BGP packets are streamed from BMP-enabled routers in the network to a server over a TCP session.
Internet Data Analytics data collection is done by a lightweight, open source collector daemon from OpenBMP (openbmp.org). OpenBMP receives, parses and stores BGP packets with near-real-time performance, and stores the data in a transactional database with flexible reporting options.
Users can access the data directly through a set of REST APIs (using JSON) or through a RESTCONF plugin.
We are also showcasing a prototype of the RAD Analysis & Visualization UI (RAD-AV) at Cisco Live! San Diego this week. This is a powerful analytics engine and user interface for enhanced visualization of Internet Data Analytics data.
Internet Data Analytics opens the doors for researchers to create exciting new applications without the burden of BGP data collection.
Serpil Bayraktar is a Principal Engineer in Chief Technology and Architecture Office at Cisco. She is responsible for advancing IP Routing Technologies and creating a new Routing Analytics framework. Serpil has more than 24 years of experience in networking industry and holds a B.S. in EE from Istanbul Technical University.
