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Section: New Results

Experiment-Driven Resarch

Participants : Adrien Lebre, Bastien Confais, Ronan-Alexandre Cherrueau, Matthieu Simonin, Thuy-Linh Nguyen.

Because STACK members have to perform a significant number of evaluations of complex software stack at large scale, the team contributes to the recent area of software-defined experiments and reproducible research.

In [36], [16] we propose a new approach to ensure reproducibility and repeatability of scientific experiments. Similar to the LAMP stack that considerably eased the web developers life, we advocate the need of an analogous software stack to help the experimenters making reproducible research. In 2018, we propose the EnosStack, an open source software stack especially designed for reproducible scientific experiments. EnosStack enables to easily describe experimental workflows meant to be re-used, while abstracting the underlying infrastructure running them. Being able to switch experiments from a local to a real testbed deployment greatly lower code development and validation time. In this paper, we describe the abstractions that have driven its design, before presenting a real experiment we deployed on Grid’5000 to illustrate its usefulness. We also provide all the experiment code, data and results to the community.

Similar to the previous work, we discuss in [37] a large experimental campaign that allows us to understand in details the boot duration of both virtualization techniques under various storage devices and resources contentions. While many studies have been focusing on reducing the time to manipulate Virtual Machine/Container images in order to optimize provisioning operations in a Cloud infrastructure, only a few studies have considered the time required to boot these systems. Some previous researches showed that the whole boot process can last from a few seconds to few minutes depending on co-located workloads and the number of concurrent deployed machines. The paper explains how we analyzed thoroughly the boot time of VMs, Dockers on top of bare-metal servers, and Dockers inside VMs. We discuss a methodology that enables us to perform fully-automatized and reproducible experimental campaigns on a scientific testbed. Thanks to this methodology, we conducted more than 14.400 experiments on Grid’5000 testbed for a bit more than 500 hours. The results we collected provide an important information related to the boot time behavior of these two virtualization technologies.

In [33], we presented the first experiment that has been done, as far as we know, on top of the Grid'5000 and FIT testbeds. More precisely, we discuss how we evaluated a new storage service for edge/IoT scenarios. Our proof-of-concept relies on the Interplanetary Object Store (IPFS), a Scale-Out NAS deployed on each site and a tree-based approach for the meta-data management [17]. This proposal enables (i) IoT devices to write locally on their closest site and (ii) to relocate automatically the objects on the sites they are requested, leading to low access times. The contribution of this work is a discussion of our attempt of using the two platforms simultaneously as well as the problems we encountered to interconnect them. Our ultimage goal is to give guidelines on how can researchers perform evaluations in a realistic environment : IoT devices comes from the FIT/IoT-lab and Fog nodes from Grid'5000.