Orbit > HowToGetStarted

How to get started

First, you need an account. Please check the UsagePolicy if you are eligible. In order to get an account please ​register here.

A typical experiment requires the following three steps:

• Reservation
• Running the experiment
• Analyzing the results

Running the Experiment

During your approved time slot, you will be able to ssh into the console of the respective grid. A console is a dedicated machine that allows access to all resources on that grid.

Currently, this requires a two step process.

• You first need to log into gateway.orbit-lab.org with your Orbit credentials using ​SSH.

• During your approved time slot, you can then log into the console corresponding to the following table using SSH:

Main grid (400 nodes)	console.grid.orbit-lab.org
Sandbox 1 (2 nodes)	console.sb1.orbit-lab.org
Sandbox 2 (2 nodes)	console.sb2.orbit-lab.org
Sandbox 5 (2 nodes)	console.sb5.orbit-lab.org
Sandbox 6 (2 nodes)	console.sb6.orbit-lab.org
Sandbox 9 (64 nodes)	console.sb9.orbit-lab.org

For e.g to access the smaller grid (64 nodes),

yourhost>ssh username@gateway.orbit-lab.org

gateway> ssh username@console.sb9.orbit-lab.org

When you have successfully logged in, you can start an experiment using the nodehandler. First time users are highly encouraged to reserve time on a sandbox instead of the main grid, and start with the built-in Hello World experiment. This experiment will send UDP datagrams of 1024 bytes from node 1-1 to node 1-2 at 300 kbps CBR traffic. Both, sender and receiver, report measurements to a database, using our OML measurement framework.

The experiment can be started with:

user#> nodehandler -t

More information on writing experiment scripts can be found in the Tutorial.

Analyzing Results

Orbit provides a sophisticated framework to efficiently collect measurements at runtime into a database. This database is accessible to the experimenter during the experiment from the console. At the end of an experiment, the database is copied to an external machine and is accessible without a reservation. More information can be found here.

Where to go from here

If you are still unsure what Orbit is, please read the FAQ and the Tutorial, otherwise go ahead and ​register.