Biblio

In contrast to traditional physical servers, a custom-built system utilizing a bare-metal hypervisor virtual server environment provides advantages of both cost savings and flexibility in terms of systems configuration. This system is designed to facilitate hands-on experience for Computer Science students, particularly those specializing in systems administration and computer networking. This multi-purpose and functional system uses an automatic advanced virtual server reservation system (AAVSRsv), written in C++, to schedule and manage virtual servers. The use of such a system could be extended to additional courses focusing on such topics as cloud computing, database systems, information assurance, as well as ethical hacking and system defense. The design can also be replicated to offer training sessions to other information technology professionals.

Cybersecurity education is a pressing need, when computer systems and mobile devices are ubiquitous and so are the associated threats. However, in the teaching and learning process of cybersecurity, it is challenging when the students are from diverse disciplines with various academic backgrounds. In this project, a number of virtual laboratories are developed to facilitate the teaching and learning process in a cybersecurity course. The aim of the laboratories is to strengthen students’ understanding of cybersecurity topics, and to provide students hands-on experience of encountering various security threats. The results of this project indicate that virtual laboratories do facilitate the teaching and learning process in cybersecurity for diverse discipline students. Also, we observed that there is an underestimation of the difficulty of studying cybersecurity by the students due to the general image of cybersecurity in public, which had a negative impact on the student’s interest in studying cybersecurity.

GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded program which provides a virtual laboratory for networking and distributed systems research and education. It is well suited for exploring networks at a scale, thereby promoting innovations in network science, security, services and applications. GENI allows researchers obtain compute resources from locations around the United States, connect compute resources using 100G Internet2 L2 service, install custom software or even custom operating systems on these compute resources, control how network switches in their experiment handle traffic flows, and run their own L3 and above protocols. GENI architecture incorporates cloud federation. With the federation, cloud resources can be federated and/or community of clouds can be formed. The heart of federation is user identity and an ability to “advertise” cloud resources into community including compute, storage, and networking. GENI administrators can carve out what resources are available to the community and hence a portion of GENI resources are reserved for internal consumption. GENI architecture also provides “stitching” of compute and storage resources researchers request. This provides L2 network domain over Internet2's 100G network. And researchers can run their Software Defined Networking (SDN) controllers on the provisioned L2 network domain for a complete control of networking traffic. This capability is useful for large science data transfer (bypassing security devices for high throughput). Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a research institute in the state of North Carolina, has developed ORCA (Open Resource Control Architecture), a GENI control framework. ORCA is a distributed resource orchestration system to serve science experiments. ORCA provides compute resources as virtual machines and as well as baremetals. ORCA based GENI ra- k was designed to serve both High Throughput Computing (HTC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) type of computes. Although, GENI is primarily used in various universities and research entities today, GENI architecture can be leveraged in the commercial, aerospace and government settings. This paper will go over the architecture of GENI and discuss the GENI architecture for scientific computing experiments.