RSpec

The ProtoGENI RSpec is our mechanism for advertising, requesting, and describing the resources used by experimenters. We derived many of the basic principles from our previous format used in assign, the network mapper used in Emulab. The format has the advantage of having a fairly simple structure and allows us to draw upon 8 years of experience in dealing with resources inside of Emulab.

The RSpec has three distinct purposes and therefore we have divided RSpecs up into three different closely-related languages to address each of these purposes in particular.

• Advertisements? are used to describe the resources available on a Component Manager. They contain information used by clients to choose resources (components). Other kinds of information (MAC addresses, hostnames, etc.) which are not used to select resources should not be in the Advertisement.
• Requests? specify which resources a client is selecting from Component Managers. They contain a (perhaps incomplete) mapping between physical components and abstract nodes and links.
• Manifests provide useful information about the slivers actually allocated by a Component Manager to a client. This involves information that may not be known until the sliver is actually created (i.e. dynamically assigned IP addresses, hostnames), or additional configuration options provided to a client.

Additional information about RSpecs:

• A tutorial describing basic concepts and how everything fits together
• Examples of valid RSpecs which you can modify to create your own
• A reference which systematically describes what RSpecs mean
• Schema documents which you can use check an RSpec for conformance
• Future plans about what form the RSpec will take in the months to come
• Discussion of Version 2 of the RSpec, which is the upcoming specification of RSpecs.