Networking testbeds provide a predictable and repeatable environment where an experimenter has full control over the underlying nodes.

However, actually achieving a high degree of control requires significant human effort for two reasons. First, the current testbed interfaces are primarily designed around resource identification and access control. They provide minimal support for deploying and orchestrating the various dynamic aspects of the experiment. Second, the amount of effort and sophistication required for achieving a high-degree of control increases significantly with increase in scale and complexity of the experiment.

Networking and cyber security scenarios are typically orchestrated manually through a sequence of several steps to deploy, direct, collect, and analyze the experiment trials. Manual and ad-hoc procedures make repeatability, the cornerstone of the scientific method extremely challenging.

DeterLab developed a scalable workflow management system, called MAGI, to provide deterministic control over the various components in an experiment.

This new capability is available at:  MAGI website