Elements: Software: Distributed Workflows for Cyberexperimentation

要素：软件：网络实验的分布式工作流程

• 批准号: 1835608
• 负责人: Jelena Mirkovic
• 金额: $ 59.88万
• 依托单位: University of Southern California
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-11-01 至 2022-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1835608&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Elements; Software; Distributed; Workflows; Cyberexperimentation

Industry and academic research in computing systems, networking and security suffers from the inability to demonstrate and validate research outcomes, because the process of research consists of complex but largely experiments on distributed, large-scale, networked test-beds. This project will address this issue by enabling rigorous and repeatable experimentation on test-beds by enabling experiments to be defined as executable workflows, that can then be repeatably run, as well as managed. This project will develop and deploy a software framework called Elie. Elie consists of an experiment representation capability, along with several supporting services that make experimentation workflows robust, fault tolerant, easily sharable and reusable. Specifically, Elie consists of: (1) A new experiment representation, called DEW, which encodes experiment behavior and allocation constraints instead of just experiment topology. (2) Capture tools, which capture a researcher's manual actions on the testbed and facilitate script-building, and DEW generation (3) Testbed-integrated version control, (4) An experiment orchestration mechanism, (5) Lightweight failure detection, (6) A GUI, which allows for experiment management throughout an experiment lifecycle. Elie's technologies can be used by researchers as a full environment or as individual tools. Collectively these technologies provide basic testbed support throughout an experiment lifecycle including the design, running, analysis, monitoring, storage and sharing stages. All of Elie's technologies are extensible, and open-sourced, to allow the research community to contribute to their development and customize them to their needs. This project fundamentally differs from the prior work in its goal to co-exist with current testbed experimentation approaches (manual and scripted experimentation) and to be applicable to a broad range of testbeds (via its translation and generation tools). Outcomes of this project will significantly improve ease of testbed experimentation, by offloading tedious, repetitive and detail-sensitive tasks to testbeds. This will shorten experiment duration and improve quality and reliability of results. This work will further make experiments more robust, enable easy sharing and reuse of experiments with minimal user effort, and facilitate repeatability and reproducibility. Overall, such advances in testbed experimentation will enable vertical development (building upon the work of others) in fields, which use testbeds, such as distributed systems, networking and cybersecurity. Sharing and reuse will also improve quality of scientific research in these fields, by enabling creation of larger and more complex experiments built on the shared artifacts of other researchers. The project team will also conduct extensive user outreach and building collaborations with other researchers that work on improving rigor of testbed experimentation, with the goal of building a strong user and developer community for Elie.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

计算系统、网络和安全领域的工业和学术研究无法证明和验证研究成果，因为研究过程包括复杂但主要是在分布式、大规模、网络化的试验台上进行的实验。这个项目将通过在测试台上进行严格和可重复的实验来解决这个问题，通过将实验定义为可执行的工作流，然后可以重复地运行，以及管理。这个项目将开发和部署一个名为Elie的软件框架。Elie包含一个实验表示功能，以及一些支持服务，这些服务使实验工作流健壮、容错、易于共享和可重用。具体来说，Elie包括：(1)一种新的实验表示，称为DEW，它编码了实验行为和分配约束，而不仅仅是实验拓扑。(2)捕获工具，用于捕获研究人员在测试平台上的手动操作，并促进脚本构建和DEW生成；(3)测试平台集成版本控制；(4)实验编排机制；(5)轻量级故障检测；(6)GUI，允许在整个实验生命周期中进行实验管理。Elie的技术可以被研究人员作为一个完整的环境或单独的工具使用。这些技术共同为整个实验生命周期提供基本的测试平台支持，包括设计、运行、分析、监控、存储和共享阶段。Elie的所有技术都是可扩展的，并且是开源的，允许研究社区为它们的开发做出贡献，并根据他们的需要定制它们。这个项目从根本上不同于之前的工作，因为它的目标是与当前的测试平台实验方法（手工和脚本实验）共存，并适用于广泛的测试平台（通过它的翻译和生成工具）。这个项目的结果将通过将繁琐的、重复的和对细节敏感的任务转移到测试平台上，显著地提高测试平台实验的易用性。这将缩短实验时间，提高结果的质量和可靠性。这项工作将进一步使实验更加健壮，使实验能够以最小的用户努力轻松共享和重用，并促进可重复性和再现性。总的来说，这种试验台实验的进步将使使用试验台的领域（如分布式系统、网络和网络安全）的垂直开发（建立在其他人的工作基础上）成为可能。共享和重用也将提高这些领域的科学研究的质量，因为可以在其他研究人员的共享工件上创建更大、更复杂的实验。项目团队还将进行广泛的用户扩展，并与其他研究人员建立合作，以提高测试平台实验的严谨性，目标是为Elie建立一个强大的用户和开发人员社区。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。