HAST: A Hybrid Academic Testbed for High Fidelity and High Performance Scenarios

HAST is a hybrid (physical + virtual) testbed for real-world network scenarios, where there is a necessity of running high fidelity/high performance experiments integrating virtual and physical equipment at layer 2 with 1/10 Gbps links. HAST orchestrates the slices associated with the experiments over an OpenStack-based shared cloud infrastructure that also supports traditional cloud computing as well as High Performance Computing (HPC) loads. HAST employs a slice-aware scheduler and takes advantage of Virtualization and Hardware-Optimization techniques to guarantee the performance and fidelity required by the different types of slices it creates. HAST aims to serve as the platform to deploy virtual scenarios in an academic setting, being able to deploy (scheduled) courses' laboratories, High Performance clusters, production-level hybrid network scenarios (e.g. a OpenRAN-based 5G network interconnected to an external RU), as well as general purpose VMs (web servers, firewalls, etc) for administrative support.