Prototyping Prototyping Facilities: Developing and Bootstrapping Testbeds

Abstract

The creation of prototypes is a convincing approach, demonstrating the feasibility of scientific ideas. Testbeds act as enablers for such prototypes, contributing the facilities to their construction. In this paper, we apply a prototype-driven approach to the development of the testbeds themselves. Thus, we select abstractions and APIs to modularize testbeds to allow a selective adaptation or substitution of specific components. To minimize costs, our approach aims to consolidate all components into a single system. Hence, we named it testbed on a single system (toast). The single-server approach demands the recreation of entire components in software such as networks or experiment nodes. Simultaneously, the softwarization of components enables flexible network topologies and scalability. At the same time, we try to keep the behavior and the performance as close to a hardware-based testbed as possible. Therefore, we rely heavily on hardware acceleration of IO using techniques such as single root IO virtualization (SR-IOV). A case study compares the accelerated IO of toast to a hardware-based testbed and a testbed without IO acceleration. We want to use toast as a training and teaching environment and a prototype facility for future research infrastructures.