An open platform for developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services with a virtual machine technique.
An open platform for developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services with a virtual machine technique.
Network testbeds for developing, deploying, and experimenting with new network services and new network architectures have become a necessity for developing clean-slate thinking towards a new generation network architecture. Isolation of resources among disruptive experiments with innovative inventions is a key to the success of such test-beds. Recent rapid progress in virtualization technology greatly facilitates such resource isolation and allocation for the testbeds.
CoreLab is a new network testbed infrastructure enhanced from PlanetLab that enables a much more flexible environment than the existing network testbeds as of today. For example, it offers full- and para-virtualization (as well as resource container) in slices using a mixture of various virtualization technologies.
Currently CoreLab is deployed only in Japan. However, we plan to extend it to the other region of the planet and also to federate with the other test-bed infrastructures that we closely collaborate with.
As with PlanetLab, CoreLab adopts slice-oriented architecture. You are given a slice, a set of virtual development environment in distribeted nodes, as a basis for developing and deploying your network programs.
CoreLab provides full-featured development environment for you. You can own a virtual machine (VM) on each distributed node and arrange the VM as you want, for example, you can install new packaged software and modify system configuration, and even more, you can replace OS kernel with a new kernel you desire.
You can choice an OS from various kind of OSes. Currently we provide a various Linux distros.
In PlanetLab, IP port numbers are shared among users and not managed by the system, hence, binding a port number is done with first-come-first-serve manner.
Meanwhile, CoreLab systematically assigns a fixed number of IP port numbers to each user so that you get away from any interferences of other users.
CoreLab consists of tens of nodes deployed across Japan.
You can see all of the nodes here.
CoreLab supports multihoming feature that a VM has multiple different networks. One is SINET etc. and another is JGN2plus. It enables you to try a routing program on CoreLab.
Currently, CoreLab is under development so that we are testing CoreLab with only closed users. If researchers want to use CoreLab for their research, please send to here.
A slice is a virtual distributed development environment that consists of virtual machines on CoreLab nodes deployed across Japan. A user (or users) assigned to a slice is given an account to login each virtual machines bound for the slice and can run network applications in them. The slice is also assigned a fixed port numbers on each node. The port numbers are accessible from Internet, i.e., you can delopy actual services on CoreLab that has tens of nodes across Japan.
CoreLab PLC (PlanetLab Central) is the central server for CoreLab. All operations for CoreLab nodes and slices are conducted through the CoreLab PLC. It provides you Web interface that enables you to check your account/slices and update some attributes of a slice. CoreLab PLC is here.
You cannot create a slice by yourself in CoreLab. What you can do is to request administrators to create your slice. This needs several setups. Please take a look at "Slice Creation Demo".
You can ssh-login a virtual machine of your slice with your private key that the corresponding public key is registered to CoreLab PLC. However, the port number for ssh server in the virtual machine is different according to each slice (see below). To ease such a tricky work, we provide a several usufull tools. You can get them from PLC web page after login. Please select "Downloads" link on the left side in the web page.
CoreLab systematically manages IP ports resources unlike PlanetLab.
CoreLab users can assign a slice with flexible numbers of IP ports.
The port numbers for each slice are able to be assigned by users themselves.
Note that the different port is reserved for ssh login.
Last modified: Thursday, 17-Mar-2011 02:36:48 JST
