The NetKarma project has ended, but its tools are still maintained.
About
As computer network experiments increase in complexity and size, it becomes increasingly difficult to fully understand the circumstances under which the experiment was run, particularly when these results are shared for purposes of reproducibility. The provenance of an experiment is its lineage or historical trace that can capture experiment conditions, time ordering, and relationships within the experiment and across the experiment and infrastructure layer.
The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) Provenance Registry (NetKarma) project, funded in October 2009, provides a tool for capturing the workflow of GENI slice creation, topology of the slice, operational status and other measurement statistics and correlate it with the experimental data.
What can NetKarma do for you?
The tool, NetKarma, will allow researchers to see the exact state of the network and store configuration of the experiment and its slice. The provenance of the data will be stored and visualized through a data portal. The provenance data can be used by the researcher to analyze their data, allow for the suspension and resumption of an experiment and provide a single reference to find the details and data collected in an experiment.
How it works
NetKarma is based on the Karma provenance architecture that has been used to collect scientific workflows in diverse domains such as meteorology and life science.
The NetKarma Provenance System and the NetKarma GMOC Adaptor are running as a persistent service on servers at Indiana University. This allows GENI users to process a GUSH log through the NetKarma Adaptor and visualize the resulting provenance graph, including the automated GMOC annotations, without having to install the NetKarma server. To try out the NetKarma provenance visualization, GENI users can process their own GUSH logs or the sample log file included with the NetKarma adaptor.
