CRI: CRD: Keeping Emulab Tuned and Humming

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

The Emulab network testbed based at the University of Utah is a premiere facility for network and distributed systems research, used by thousands of researchers and students at hundreds of institutions around the world. It has come to be a central resource in the network research community. In addition to the services provided by the facility itself, the Emulab team is universally praised for their responsiveness in answering questions and addressing problems. Emulab is not only a highly successful facility, it is software: an "operating system" to control network and distributed system experimentation. That software, largely unchanged, is running more than 20 other testbed sites, including the DETER security-oriented testbed. A large amount of skilled development and operations time is required to deal with changing requirements and to support the facility's users and other Emulab facilities. This project supports a significant portion of those personnel costs. The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in finding ways to continuously evolve the Emulab software base, while keeping it running 24/7. Doing so is additionally challenging because separate work will be federating Emulab with other testbeds. The broader impact of this proposal will be to enable thousands of researchers, students, and hundreds of research projects to run network-oriented experiments that would otherwise be impossible.