GPLMT: A Lightweight Experimentation and Testbed Management Framework

TL;DR

GPLMT is a flexible, lightweight framework designed to simplify managing complex, distributed testbeds and ensure experiment reproducibility and comparability across diverse platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a portable, formalized experiment description language and a management tool for large-scale, heterogeneous testbeds, addressing key challenges in experiment lifecycle management.

Findings

Enables formalization and portability of experiment descriptions

Supports management of large-scale, heterogeneous testbeds

Has been validated through user studies in various scenarios

Abstract

Conducting experiments in federated, distributed, and heterogeneous testbeds is a challenging task for researchers. Researchers have to take care of the whole experiment life cycle, ensure the reproducibility of each run, and the comparability of the results. We present GPLMT, a flexible and lightweight framework for managing testbeds and the experiment life cycle. \gplmt provides an intuitive way to formalize experiments. The resulting experiment description is portable across varying experimentation platforms. GPLMT enables researchers to manage and control networked testbeds and resources, and conduct experiments on large-scale, heterogeneous, and distributed testbeds. We state the requirements and the design of GPLMT, describe the challenges of developing and using such a tool, and present selected user studies along with their experience of using GPLMT in varying scenarios.