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In the last decade, the Internet has grown tremendously in scale, heterogeneity and raw performance. Unfortunately, as the Internet has matured, it has become more resistant to change and the technology is growing more complex. Meanwhile, access to much of the technical information is unavailable to researchers (particularly in academia), limiting their ability to make significant contributions. The Open Network Laboratory (ONL) research project is creating a high performance networking testbed that will enable experimental evaluation of advanced networking concepts in a realistic setting and make it available to the networking research community.
The laboratory is built around a set of open-source, extensible, high performance routers that have been developed at Washington University in St. Louis. Users can extend, modify or replace the software running in the routers' embedded processors as well as extend, modify or replace the routers' hardware. Hardware extensibility is provided through the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) which can be dynamically reconfigured to support new capabilities. Users can also configure the testbed network using a gui interface , run applications under the control of a gui and monitor those running applications using the built-in data gathering mechanisms. Data visualization and real-time remote displays are provided, allowing users to conveniently develop the insights needed to understand the behavior of new capabilities within a complex operating environment.