hpc-net

Stateless, ethernet-based networking for datacenter-scale HPC applications.

About

This repository contains PoCs for a set of networking protocols that use stateless, flow-zone-addressing enabled through software-defined-networks.

Setup

Step 1: Create Virtual Machine

• Download VMWare Workstation Player (link)
• Download the Ubuntu Server 20.04.6 LTS image (link)
• Install VMWare and create a VM with at least 75 GBs of disk space and 4 GBs of RAM. Use the Ubuntu image downloaded earlier and install the OS to the VM.
• Run the next steps inside the VM.

Step 2: Install P4, Mininet and their Dependencies

Run the following commands, in order;

git clone https://github.com/jafingerhut/p4-guide

# This script takes a long time to install (approx. 3+ hrs for me)
# and takes a lot of disk space, but is quite stable. You may try v5 of 
# the same script (in the same folder) which is much faster and takes 
# less space but is also less stable and may break some installations.
./p4-guide/bin/install-p4dev-v6.sh |& tee log.txt

The installation files will be present in the home directory and can be deleted after installation completes to free up disk space.

Step 3: Install P4-Utils

The P4-Utils library makes it convenient to build and deploy p4 programs to switches in Mininet. To install, run the following commands, in order;

git clone https://github.com/nsg-ethz/p4-utils.git
cd p4-utils
sudo ./install.sh

NOTE: DO NOT DELETE THE p4-utils/ FOLDER IN THE HOME DIRECTORY AS THAT WILL BREAK YOUR INSTALLATION.

Step 4: Setup VSCode Server (Optional)

I recommend using VSCode's remote development plugin to make it more convenient to work in the VM. Instructions can easily be Googled.

Step 5: Enable X11 Forwarding (Optional)

These are steps for Windows - not sure these will work (may not even be required) for other OSs.

• In Powershell run the following command:

  setx DISPLAY "localhost:0"

• Install the VcXsrv Windows X Server (link). Just install everything with the default selected options.

• In your ssh config file add the following lines to the profile;

  ForwardX11 yes
  ForwardX11Trusted yes
  

  Alternatively, you can also run ssh with the following command;

  ssh -XY <username>@<vm_IP_address>

• Once inside the VM, the following command should print something;

  echo $DISPLAY
  # outputs "localhost:10.0" for me

• When running Mininet in the VM make sure to use sudo -E.

Make sure to start VcXsrv manually before SSHing into the VM otherwise the X11 client won't connect to the display.

Usage

Check the src/ folder for more usage instructions.