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Network Testbed Emulab.net
gseidman writes: "Have you ever needed to simulate a network? Tired of old ns? Do you just hate dealing with hardware in general? Take a peek at Utah's Emulab.Net. They have over 300 PCs, some StrongARM devices, roughly 5 miles of cabling, a huge and expensive switch, and great software for setting up a virtual LAN. They also have a gallery showing the machine room in various stages of completion (did I mention five miles of cabling?)."
ooooh... what about a Beo.... ah, forget it.
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How much does it cost to have them do what they do for you?
Every day, humans lose-and replace-200 billion red blood cells. Remarkably, our bodies manufacture 2 million replacement cells in a split second. A single red blood cell will make an incredible journey, traveling 100 miles through a vast network of 60,000 miles of veins, capillaries and arteries.
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Wow, did I mention my intestines are about 8.5 meters long and will be far more productive!!!
This is applied research, the type that may have direct and positive effects on improving security and efficiency in the immediate future.
Unlike dark matter research, Mars colonization, and subatomic research, this stuff is the kind of thing that should attract wide funding from business. Immediate payoffs are likely.
Basic research is fine, but I wish that the money poured into it would go towards immediate business applications. More available cash would make those venture capitalists a lot nicer and less demanding of unrealistic profits in an unrealistic period of time.
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It's already starting to slow down. Now would be a good chance to start dedicating some of those machines as backup web servers, eh?
What's your damage, Heather?
5 miles of cables? I hope they labled them... :)
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They probably didn't have a 2 ft. high crawl space that they had to run it through.
What is it with the modern generation who think that simulations will improve their likely performance? It is all idiocy, when I was young we did things with a spanner and looked at das blinkenlights under real world conditions. This is so much nonsense, really, the sort of thing I'd expect to come out of our modern CS courses.
Computing is just an offshoot of down-and-dirty engineering, and none of us should forget it. The day we forget the feel of the netowrk cards in our hands, the smell of the overheating cat5, is the day we lose control over the netowkrks of America, the day that our economy starts going backwards.
I don't know what brainchild designed the layout of those switches, but the fact that they went for the RJ-48 blades versus the Telco (RJ21X) blades in those switches shows sloppy planning. What if one of the blades in the middle goes out? They have to unplug 48 Cat-5 cables versus unscrewing 4 telco harmonicas and leaving the 48 ports untouched on a patch panel
If you're going to put forth that kind of effort and money, why not do it right the first time?
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guess we know it works as well as the real thing -- its been /.ed...*sigh*
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I went and had a look at the pictures, it reminds me of the mental image I have of Asimov's Multivac city-sized super computer.
Fun.
You can't take the sky from me...
Not to be a party pooper, but 5 miles of cable, really isn't that impressive. We ran 3 at the ISP I used to work for. Not to mention all the fiber running from the foxbox. 5 miles of round ide cables would really be cool...
Um, this is my sig.
I totally agree with you. Simulation doesn't prove that things will be all peachy cream later on in the "real world".
Then again, if a 1/100th scale model does a nose dive in the wind tunnel when they throw a little turbulence at it, you can bet the ranch that plane will be redesigned. Testing and modeling only show the existence or non-existence of very particular problems. We just usually hope that we can "test" out as many likely problems as possible.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
This can only help network engineers to come up with scalable designs that work under various load scenarios.
was wondering if anyone else forsaw some of the nightmares this place holds
if it uses 5 miles of cable? ;-)
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The funny part is, it isn't just the network testbed room that is that cramped and packed with wiring. I'm not sure who designed the Merril Engineering building, but it wasn't an engineer!
It seems the cable is a bit excessive. Showy, looks professional. I work with Crays with the Navy, with a farm X1.7 that size underneath, never to be swamped with that much CAT5, much less in a test scenario. But we wish them the best (wonder if they test speed amongst those many meters of yellow. . .)
Another interesting tidbit:
If i remember correctly, a couple years back a modified version of Doom with ultra-high player counts was used to study network testbed performance.
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Have you ever needed to ____? Tired of the old ___? Do you just hate dealing with ___? Take a peek at ____. They have ___, ___, and ___. They also have ___, ___, and ___.
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The post submitter makes 5 miles of cable seem like a lot. Well, it isn't. Even a small office complex can burn through 50,000 ft a cabling in short work. Running two data cables effectivly doubles your cable requirements. Depending on the situation the installer may even lay a third cable for voice. (What standard was that?) Anayways, 5 miles of cable is not a lot.
A group here at Duke has just started to collaborate with the Emulab people on a similar area of research. We're pretty excited, since we think our group has a lot to share with the Utah group. It's just kind of weird to load Slashdot and find your collaborators on the front page. Here I was thinking I'd take a break from research and read Slashdot, but noooooo .....
And to respond to another poster, maybe if Emulab had Muse-like resource management of their web server, they could handle the web load. :) It would be nice if someone could work on merging the two, getting the two to leverage the best parts of both, work on .... uh, maybe I should get back to work before my advisor sees me posting on Slashdot. :)
-jdm
There would be a huge amount of pride on owning a 300 based machine network. Right now, I am impressed with my personal 9 machines. Fun with beo. Anyway, just an offshoot, here is a nifty little network auralizer that some of you might be interested in...
I guess a Q3 test is out of the question..
but seriously, it's nice to see that schools get this kind of funding. Previously, only the heavyweights of the industry and the government could afford such projects.
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yeah great
much of the intresting things about networks has been done through live capture of a system and then sifting the data
phone networks work well because they have had a long time trying things out and finding optermal solutions to random problems that come up in live networks (problems with GPRS networks where only seen once semi live)
also you dont get the scanning and general attacks that do strange things to routers
its like saying yep we have 1000 monkeys and typewriters but we need you to go through the data and compare it to the real world
you might as well do it in the real world how expensive is a switch/hub and network cards ?
silly but nice
regards
john jones
the secretary spills a cup of coffee on the router or the chief engineer urinates drunkenly on the packet switcher, you can't tell how your network will perform.
Damn, but I'm glad I don't do I.T support in your office!
Of course- if those are common occurances around your neck of the woods, I expect hardware performance problems are the least of your worries..
I assume that One is acting as the main router, and the other are using it. I assume also that the switches are interconnected with 2x1Gb/s fibers, probably full-duplex and load/sharing above the two links.
What surprises me is that those switch fabric supports up to 256Gb/s bandwidth, but they are just connected with 2Gb/s links : talk about some bottlnecks here...
But maybe I did not read enough documents ?
Any comments from the builders of that lab ?
[Pruneau
Boy, I wonder if one of the projects they're planning to emaulate is "wide scale hardware failure." Look at their node configuration (hard drive boldfaced):
:)
128 new nodes:
850Mhz P3
512M ECC memoryold reliable BX chipset
40G 7200rpm IDE disk (IBM Deskstar 60gxp)
5 Intel Pro/100+ network interfaces
2 on board
1 on a single Intel card
2 on a dual Intel card
No video at all
serial console
This is the very same hard drive drive we drew and quartered here, and has gotten IBM a big fat lawsuit for rampant failures.
So, I guess their error recovery is going to be tested to the limits very shortly, especially with the space/heat issues inherent in the installation exacerbating the engineering flaws in the 60GXPs.
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While I agree with much of your sentiment, hardly being a fan of the Ivory Tower, if you take a look at some of the projects on the website, you'll see that many of them are things that are hard to simulate AT ALL in the real world. For instance, there are projects there to research methods of stopping DDos attacks. They can hardly start flooding a real WAN to test their software. While it is true that they can fall back to mathematical models, these are complex and can never hope to realistically simulate some of the non-deterministic elements nearly as well as a real WAN (or this network).
That said, I also can't say that this network really has SUFFICIENT usefulness to justify its existence (after all, how many people need to test denial of service attacks and such?); we'll let the markets resolve that, eh?
I worked at a school that was wired by morons. We had over 15 miles of cat 5 in the ceiling. Talk about an administration nightmare. One line goes dead, and everything is shafted. Every network drop in the building terminated directly in the central comms room. No hubs for labs, just 200 cat five lines heading back to fuck central.
If you have enough RAM, vmware can do a nifty job of emulating a network. Not much good for low level protocol debugging, but it is a handy tool for experimenting with routing protocols, replication (AD, Lotus, etc), file sharing, etc.
Obviously, not in the same class as what's being talked about here, but something to keep in mind.
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This black faceplate 1U servers that you see are Intel SRM2K servers. I tested one out for production use about two months ago. They are a very cheap chassis -- cheap cost, and cheap quality. About the only good thing of them is that they allow for both a full size PCI card and a low profile PCI card -- one of the few 1U height systems that support more than one PCI card.
The big switches that I see are either Cisco Catalyst 6009s or 6509s.
Yellow cables are plain old Cat5. Orange cables are multimode fiber, for Gigabit Ethernet.
That is about all that I can tell.
I just love how most of the comments posted in reply to this story are all focused on how useless a simulator is. Sure, it isn't the real world, but it's not meant to be. You can "break" stuff in a simulator that you probably wouldn't want to (or can't afford to) break in the real world. And what about things that don't exist in the real world, but that this simulator could be made to, well, simulate? If you can't think of anything worthwhile to use a tool like this for, you probably shouldn't be allowed near it anyway. Or the real world, for that matter.
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Did anyone else give a little Beavis 'n Butthead style chuckle when they read "... 160 edge nodes (Compaq DNARD Sharks)..."
Nards. Heh... Nard Sharks... Hehh hehhh.
In a 30,000 square foot office space, with only 50 employees, we have 42 miles of cat-6. 5 miles is only 25 spools of cable.
The office was wired for 150 people, so we're not using even half the ports. And since this particular office is all tech people, everyone has at least 2 machines on their desk (I have 4).
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I'm looking at emulating a multiple domain system as a training system for my company and found that mini linux kernels booted up in VMWare will do the trick. Looks like I've got few hundred feet of fake cable.
Take a peek at http://hardware.localhost.nl The site just opened, still gathering pictures...
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