Establishing Resource Allocation Policies in the PlanetLab Federation

Over time PlanetLab has evolved from a centrally-administered testbed to a federation of regional testbeds that are operated independently. The PlanetLab software is also freely available, which has allowed many organizations to bring up their own "private" PlanetLabs. For most private PlanetLabs, a barrier to entering the federation is the inability to express access and allocation policies for their own resources, and the lack of tools to communicate, analyze, and enforce those policies. In the first part of my talk, I will present an overview of the PlanetLab federation. Next I will focus on VINI, a private PlanetLab we have deployed in Internet2 and NLR, and which is intended for evaluating new network architectures. Finally, I will describe a tool ("sfatables") we have built for expressing and enforcing resource allocation policies. Our approach was designed to enable VINI to federate with PlanetLab, but it is general enough to accommodate a diverse collection of computing facilities.

This talk describes joint work with Larry Peterson, Sapan Bhatia, Jennifer Rexford, and Nick Feamster.