SB9

SB9 is dedicated to ​OpenFlow experimentation (NOTE: Nodes in SB9 don't have wireless interfaces!). As show in Figure 1, Sanbox 9 is built around an OpenFlow capable switch with 12 nodes, 7 of which are equipped with ​NetFPGA cards, 2 nodes with ​NetFPGA-10G card and 2 general purpose ORBIT nodes and a sandbox console. In addition, there is a fast cache machine, with a 10g connection and a ssd storage array fast enough to saturate that link.

Figure 1: SB9

The switch labeled 'sw-sb-09', a ​Pronto 3290, provides the central connectivity backplane for 'DATA' interface of all hosts/NetFPGAs in the sandbox. Each host (node1-1..node1-12) is connected to the sw-sb-09 switch through one 1GbE data connection on the interface 'eth0' or 'exp0'. As is the case with the rest of ORBIT nodes, a second GbE interface ('eth1' or 'control') of each node, that is used exclusively for experiment control (incl. ssh/telnet sessions), is connected to an external control switch outside of sandbox.

The first 7 hosts (node1-1..node1-7) each contain a 4x1GbE NetFPGA installed on a PCI slot. Each NetFPGA has 4 connections to the top switch, corresponding to its 4-GbE ports nf2c0-nf2c3.

Nodes node1-8 and node1-9 each contain a 4x10GbE NetFPGA installed on a PCI Express slot. top switch while the remaining two are directly connecting the two nodes.

Node1-12 has eth4 connected to the pronto switch at 10g, with eth5 currently unconnected. It also has 2 unconnected 10gbase-T ports, enumerated as eth2 and eth3.

The Pronto switch is a OpenFlow enabled switch and can be run in native or OpenFlow mode by controlling its boot configuration. When in native mode, it runs the Pica8 Xorplus switch software while when it is in OpenFlow mode it can run either stock Indigo firmware or experimenter provided OpenFlow image for Pronto switches. The mode of operation is controlled by the network aggregate manager service.