Fed4FIRE

This page provides specific information about Grid'5000 for Fed4FIRE users.

Current status (November 2019)

The federation of Grid'5000 inside Fed4FIRE is not complete yet. This means that Fed4FIRE users might need to use Grid'5000-specific tools, interfaces and API, instead of the Fed4FIRE-standard ones.

• The Grid'5000 Aggregate Manager (am.grid5000.fr) advertises Grid'5000 resources
• Fed4FIRE users need to create a separate Grid'5000 account
• Fed4FIRE users need to use Grid'5000 tools and APIs to reserve and configure resources. They are documented in the tutorials listed below.
• Network-level interconnection using dedicated links with other Fed4FIRE testbed is functional. See Fed4FIRE_VLAN_Stitching. Network interconnection over the public Internet is functional (Grid'5000 nodes can access the public internet).

The main Grid'5000 tutorial is Getting Started. Additional tutorials are listed on the Users home page.

Contact information

• Fed4FIRE contact points for Grid'5000:
  • Lucas Nussbaum (lucas.nussbaum@loria.fr)
  • David Margery (david.margery@inria.fr)
  • Luke Bertot (luke.bertot@inria.fr)
• Grid'5000 support staff: see the Support page

FAQ

Limits for the duration of an experiment?

If experiment means project, there is no limit. Accounts are created with a short-term expiration date (one month or two months depending on the process used for account creation) but can be extended at will.

If experiment means resources reservation, the limits are described in the Grid'5000 Usage Policy. The philosophy behind the Usage Policy is that users should be able to find some resources to prepare experiments during the day, and then reserve resources in advance to do large-scale experiments during nights and week-ends. So the effective limits are 10 hours during the day (9h-19h), 14 hours during nights (19h-9h), and 62 hours during week-ends (Friday 19h -> Monday 9h). Users are therefore strongly encouraged to automate the setup of their experiments (using scripts or tools such as Ansible). If an experiment requires a longer reservation, a special request can be made, as described in the Grid'5000 Usage Policy.

Sharing one user account per experiment?

Even if several persons are going to collaborate on the same experiment, we strongly prefer that each person uses its own account, for traceability purposes. It is possible to share scripts etc using standard Unix mechanisms (directory permissions), or using an external Git service (which are accessible from Grid'5000 nodes).

Public IP Address for Grid'5000 nodes?

Grid'5000 nodes are on a private network. Interconnection to the Internet is achieved to a NAT, using a 10 Gbps link to RENATER (the french NREN).

We are in the process of:

• Adding public IPv6 addresses to nodes
• Adding a configurable firewall to allow reaching Grid'5000 nodes from the Internet using IPv6
• Extending this to a set of IPv4 addresses (probably doing NAT from the public IPv4 address to the internal IPv4 addresses)

However, this is still work in progress.