ProtoGENI is a control and monitoring framework software from the University of Utah. It is based on an enhanced version of the Emulab testbed management software. The Emulab testbed is used to perform experimental network and research about distributed systems.

ProtoGENI was created to provide the integration between Emulab and other testbeds in order to build the Cluster C facility of GENI. This control framework was design based on the SFA (Slice-based Facility Architecture) for federation among the testbeds.

The SFA components implemented by ProtoGENI are:

• The Clearing House behaves as a central registry, coordinating the federation;
• The Aggregate Manager and Slice Authority are responsible for the operation and  resource control;
• The RSpec is a data interchange format to describe resources properties consistently between testbeds.

In the figure below presents an overview of the ProtoGENI federation architecture, presenting ProtoGENI main components and their interactions.

ProtoGENI provides the interface to allocate and manage resources from Emulab testbed and backbone nodes:

• The Emulab resources are composed of local nodes and virtual network links;
• The backbone nodes consist of PCs, NetFPGA cards and an Ethernet switch.

For the utilization of ProtoGENI, the experimenter must define the desired resources in a RSpec file or using the Flack interface (a Flash-based GUI). The RSpec file can also contain the network topology of the experiment. After the submission, the requested resources will be allocated automatically and the virtual links between the nodes will be created as it was defined in the experiment topology. The experimenter can access the provided resources by SSH (for any node), as well as configure and run the experiment. The instrumentation and monitoring of the experiments are achieved by the ProtoGENI tools allowing passive and active measurements. The INSTOOLS toolkit can be used mainly for passive measurements while LAMP (based on perfSonar) can be used for active measurements and some passive measurements.