Operations

Hardware

System Overview

The ORBIT Testbed consists of 416 nodes, 26 Servers, and 45 ethernet switches. Nodes, servers, and switches are grouped into ORBIT resources which are referred to as "grid", and "sb1" through "sb8". The grid consists of the 400 nodes, a server that acts as a console, and 30 switches that are seperated into control, data, and CM networks. The eight sandboxes consist of 2 nodes, a console server, and a switch which aggregates all three networks.

Each resource is connected to the ORBIT back-end via the control, data, and CM networks. Each network of each resource is a seperate subnet following RFC 1981 and all route back to a Cisco PIX 515E Firewall apliance. Each subnet is connected to individual DMZ interfaces on the firewall and, therefore, has a set of security rules governing all traffic to and from each network.

The Control network is comprised of 10 discrete switches on the grid, and shared switches on the sandboxes. Its purpose is to allow remote access to the nodes via ssh as well as provide a back channel for nodehandler communication and measurments collection.

Each resource shares the same ORBIT back-end which consists of 17 servers connected via a series of gigabit ethernet switches. The back-end servers run a variety of services ranging from industry standard services, such as DNS and DHCP, to ORBIT specific services.

Software

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