Emulab - Network Emulation Testbed Home
|
Announcement: The CIAS Emulab is open for business To get started, a faculty member should select "Request Account" using the button on the left of this page. Then select "Start a New Project" and fill in the fields there. Then, your students can "Request Account," "Join an Existing Project," and then "Create a new Experiment." Then you can start doing science. We hope you find this infrastructure useful. Please remember to acknowledge Cisco and CIAS support in your papers. E.g., "This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (CNS-XX-XXXX), Cisco, and UT Austin's Center for Information Assurance and Security." Thanks. |
Capabilities
The CIAS Emulab provides a shared infrastructure for experimental computer science. Several dozen PCs in racks, combined with secure, user-friendly web-based tools, and driven by ns-compatible scripts or a Java GUI, allow you to remotely configure and control machines and links down to the hardware level. Packet loss, latency, bandwidth, queue sizes--all can be user-defined. Even the OS disk contents can be fully and securely replaced with custom images by any experimenter. While an "experiment" is running, the experiment (and its associated researchers) get exclusive use of the assigned machines, including root access. Emulab can load ten or a hundred disks in less than two minutes, so switching between experiments is fast.
Emulab provides integrated access to a wide range of experimental environments: from simulated to emulated to wide-area network testbeds. Emulab strives to preserve the control and ease of use of simulation, without sacrificing the realism of emulation and live network experimentation. Emulab unifies all of these environments under a common user interface, and integrates the three into a common framework. This framework provides abstractions, services, and namespaces common to all, such as allocation and naming of nodes and links. By mapping the abstractions into domain-specific mechanisms and internal names, Emulab masks much of the heterogeneity of the different approaches.
Resources
The CIAS Emulab currently provides 20 3GHz 1GB machines, each of which has 5 100Mbit interfaces through high-speed Cisco switches. We provide default OS software (Redhat Linux 9.0, FreeBSD 4.10, and Windows XP); the default configuration on your nodes includes accounts for project members, root access, DNS service, and standard compilers, linkers, and editors. Fundamentally, however, all the software you run on it, including all bits on the disks, is replaceable and entirely your choice. The same applies to the network's characteristics, including its topology: configurable by users.
Our goal is for Emulab to meet most of the needs of experimental researchers in the department. By avoiding the need for each of us to maintain our own private infrastructures, we should all have access to more resources for less work and cost. In the near future, we expect to add more nodes, including some multi-processor, multi-core, multi-disk machines. Although we have no current plans to do so, the Utah Emulab supports a robotic mobile wireless testbed and a fixed 802.11 wireless testbed, and if there is demand this is something we could consider as well. If you are considering buying some new equipment and think that it could be a useful addition to Emulab, please contact Mike Dahlin and we can figure out if it can be added.
Acknowledgements
We hope you find this infrastructure useful. Please remember to acknowledge Cisco and CIAS support in your papers. E.g., "This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (CNS-XX-XXXX), Cisco, and UT Austin's Center for Information Assurance and Security." Thanks.