ARCFIRE researchers were present at the 2nd Fed4FIRE conference to give a presentation and a demo of Rumba, the framework in Python developed in Work Package 3 of ARCFIRE which allows a user to write a Python script to define a RINA network. The presentation was given on the first day of the conference and started with an introduction of RINA which took the approach of starting from the simple case of local Inter Process Communication (IPC) and then extending this idea step-by-step to IPC over a network. The presentation then introduced the pluggable software architecture of Rumba, followed by an in-depth example of a script that defines a RINA network. The slideset can be found below. Afterwards, the audience asked several questions:

• (Q) RINA has been around for a while, what is the current state-of-the-art? Your presentation didn’t really talk about scaling up in terms of nodes? (A) The different prototypes are becoming more stable as time progresses. We will be able to better answer the question of scalability after ARCFIRE’s experiments have concluded.
• (Q) How do you select the nodes to use in the testbed? Is this done automatically or do you have to specify it? (A) The idea of Rumba is to be as expressive as possible with the least syntax. This means that currently the nodes are selected automatically, and only physical machines are selected. We can look into adding this functionality to Rumba to help with the scalability aspect, since one could for instance desire that a client machine is simply a Virtual Machine and not an actual physical machine.

On the second day of the conference a 3 hour demonstration of RINA and Rumba was given in the demo session of the conference.  There were about 15 other demonstrations happening at the same time. Many people were interested in Rumba, and a lot of positive feedback was received, mainly on the fact that RINA (and Rumba) simplifies networking management tremendously.