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，网络和安全方面的行业和学术研究遭受了无法证明和验证研究成果的影响，因为研究过程包括复杂但很大程度上在分布式，大规模的，网络的测试床上进行的实验。 该项目将通过启用测试床的严格且可重复的实验来解决此问题，通过启用实验定义为可执行的工作流，然后可以重复运行并进行管理。该项目将开发并部署一个称为Elie的软件框架。 Elie由实验表示功能，以及几种支持服务，这些服务使实验工作流程鲁棒，容易容易，易于共享且可重复使用。 具体而言，ELIE由：（1）一种称为DEW的新实验表示，该表示编码实验行为和分配约束，而不是仅仅是实验拓扑。 （2）捕获工具，该工具捕获了研究人员在测试台上的手动动作并促进脚本构建，以及露水生成（3）测试床综合版本控制，（4）实验编排机制，（5）轻巧故障检测，（6）A GUI，允许在整个实验生命周期内进行实验管理。研究人员可以将Elie的技术用作完整的环境或单个工具。 这些技术共同提供了整个实验生命周期的基本测试床支持，包括设计，跑步，分析，监视，存储和共享阶段。 Elie的所有技术都是可扩展的，开源的，以使研究社区能够为他们的发展做出贡献，并根据他们的需求定制他们。 该项目从根本上与先前的工作不同，该项目与当前的测试床实验方法（手动和脚本实验）并存，并适用于广泛的测试台（通过其翻译和发电工具）。该项目的结果将通过将乏味，重复性和细节敏感的任务卸载到测试床上，从而显着提高测试平台实验的便利性。 这将缩短实验持续时间并提高结果的质量和可靠性。 这项工作将进一步使实验更强大，以最少的用户工作使实验轻松共享和重复使用，并促进可重复性和可重复性。总体而言，在测试床实验中的这种进步将使使用测试台（例如分布式系统，网络和网络安全）的田野中垂直开发（基于他人的工作）。共享和再利用还将通过创建基于其他研究人员的共同工件的更大，更复杂的实验来提高这些领域的科学研究质量。该项目团队还将与其他研究人员进行广泛的用户外展和建立合作，以改善测试床实验的严格性，目的是为Elie建立一个强大的用户和开发人员社区。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的智力和更广泛影响的评估来通过评估来支持的，这是值得的。