EL2W: Extended Layer 2 Services for Bare-Metal Provisioning Over WAN

Researchers are embracing deep learning in various interdisciplinary research domains, recognizing undeniable benefits offered by deep neural networks. However, in order to meet the substantial computational demands for processing deep learning models, researchers extensively rely on cloud servers. Nevertheless, the shared nature of cloud servers encourages research labs and facilities to establish private clouds, ensuring exclusive access to computational resources and safeguarding data privacy. Creating a private cloud from bare metal presents challenges with existing provisioning solutions. These solutions not only come with a set of complex installation and configuration steps but are also limited to a constrained local Ethernet broadcast domain for network loading, which may pose unforeseen difficulties and risks for researchers who do not specialize in computing. To address these issues, this paper introduces EL2W, Extended Layer 2 services to Wide area networks (WAN), a novel approach we developed following Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles. EL2W aims to help automate the system installation procedure by reducing the repetitive configurations and setups using Infrastructure-as-Code based scripts and codes. In addition, EL2W can securely expand an Ethernet network’s logical and functional extent beyond the current physical limitations of Ethernet layer 2 networks. We describe the implementation and architecture of a remote bare metal provisioning system built upon secure extended layer 2 networks. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of EL2W for establishing a secure layer 2 connection to provide essential bare metal provisioning services, as well as the effectiveness of a local proxy cache server to reduce the operating system loading time.