Virtual Wall

The Virtual Wall is a large scale generic environment for advanced networking, distributed software, cloud, big data and scalability research and testing.

The testbed contains 550+ bare metal and GPU servers which are fully configurable both in terms of their software installation (choice of operating systems, drivers, applications, etc.) as well as how their network interfaces are physically interconnected. The nodes can be assigned different functionalities ranging from terminal, server, network node, and impairment node. The nodes can be connected to test boxes for wireless terminals, generic test equipment, simulation nodes (for combined emulation and simulation) etc.

The Virtual Wall features automatic provisioning for fast context switching (e.g. 1 week experiments), as well as remote access. Some examples of experiments:

  • Scaling out big data experiments on 20+ bare metal servers
  • Building your own cloud for performance measurements
  • Learn how IPv6 works in practice
  • BGP networking with quagga
  • Performance measurements on different kinds of bare metal hardware
  • Machine learning with GPU servers

For more information and technical details, see http://doc.ilabt.imec.be

People

  • Brecht Vermeulen
  • Joeri Casteels
  • Sai Roberts
  • Vincent Borja
  • Wim Van de Meerssche
  • Thijs Walcarius

Projects

  • Fed4FIRE: Federation for Future Internet experimentation
  • F-Interop: IoT remote interoperability

Pictures

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