Talk: Virtual Time Machine for Reproducibility

Virtual Time Machine for Large-Scale Reproducible Distributed Emulation

2017 GEFI Workshop
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
October 26, 2017

Abstract

Cyber-infrastructure and meta-cloud testbeds, such as GENI, CloudLab, and Chameleon, are shared facilities that can be configured to provide a diverse and yet controllable environment for testing network protocols and distributed applications. Combined with emulation capabilities, these testbeds provide automated tools for allocating resources, instantiating applications, and collecting measurements. To facilitate reproducibility, they provide support for re-creating the execution environment between experiment runs. A major issue, however, with reproducibility on these systems is the lack of accurate control of time, especially when the experiment faces resource oversubscription. Virtual time management has been proposed for scheduling time dilated virtual machines to increase time fidelity. We hereby propose a unified resource and time scheme on cyber-infrastructure and meta-cloud testbeds to enable large-scale, high-capacity, high-fidelity, reproducible distributed emulation.

Slides