New, more realistic multi-hop network testbed

[Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos]

Hi Kim,

Kim Quirk wrote:
>
> Poly - What I can't tell from your progress reports is exactly what is 
> needed for us to get to the next level. On the surface it sounds like 
> you had to rebuild chat to make it work with cerebro. If so, does that 
> mean all activities would have to be modified to a new API? 

No. I refactored Chat to the Xavier activity 
(http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/ypod/xavier-activity;a=summary) as a 
proof of concept that collaboration could be solely based on Cerebro.

> What else is needed?

Create a connection manager for Cerebro. This would also be a great 
chance for OLPC to become more intimate with the internals of telepathy, 
which is why maybe someone from OLPC should take on this task? I think 
we should aim to have that implemented and tested by August. Some work 
has been done on this by Michael Stone already.

> How does the cerebro solution fit into the rest of the stack and the 
> other technologies we are working on for 8.2.0 (August) and future 
> releases?

Cerebro should totally replace salut - the former is a superset, in 
terms of functionality, of the latter (eg. cerebro additionally offers 
network layout, distance information, more efficient file transfer etc), 
while it scales about an order of magnitude better than salut. 
Furthermore, cerebro would never "black-out" with broadcast storms, so 
if there is a jabber server present, it will always be discoverable.

>
> If the cerebro solution is still in research and there are a lot of 
> issues that still need to be worked out before we can release it, then 
> we need someone to help track all the issues and help resolve them 
> through the stack in order to get something to release stage.

It depends on how you define "still in research". If that means not 
having been used by thousands of children around the world already, then 
yes it's still in research, but so is most of the XO's software. 
Realistically speaking, cerebro has been tested more extensively than 
the rest of the collaboration stack, not only on tens of XOs, but other 
platforms also.

> Let's work with Michail on this as he probably needs to take the lead.
>
> As a first step, I will order 10 laptops for Poly to find permanent 
> homes for throughout the MIT campus.

thank you.

>
> Kim

p.


-- 
Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
Graduate student
Viral Communications
MIT Media Lab
Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058
http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/