Building the Internet of 2025
ModelNet Enhancements
One of the goals of the Evergrow project in its final year is to bring together the results obtained in WP1, concerned with observing the Internet and measuring its properties, and WP3, concerned with developing scalable algorithms for Internet-based systems, by creating an evaluation test-bed for large-scale dynamic distributed systems. The test-bed allows participants to evaluate their systems developed as part of WP3 in emulated realistic settings available from WP1.
We have decided to use ModelNet, the large-scale network emulator most widely used by the peer-to-peer research community, as a basic emulation mechanism for our evaluation infrastructure. To achieve an emulation infrastructure useful for research in peer-to-peer systems, we complement the network emulation with the ability to emulate the lifetime dynamism (churn) of the peers participating in the system under evaluation, and the ability to emulate the partitioning and merging of the emulated network.
Because ModelNet was not directly usable on Evergrow machines, KTH and SICS undertook an effort to make it available on the Evergrow IBM blades infrastructure. This effort meant porting ModelNet to the FreeBSD 6.2 (the latest stable version at that time) operating system kernel. This port was disseminated to the ModelNet authors and will be made available for all users of ModelNet.
ModelNet has been enhanced to support the emulation of the partitioning and merging of the emulated virtual network.
ModelNet port to FreeBSD 6.2 source code
You can find the source code of the ModelNet port to FreeBSD 6.2 here.Some early performance evaluation of the port can be found here.