CRI: CRD: Keeping Emulab Tuned and Humming

位于犹他大学的Emulab网络试验台是网络和分布式系统研究的一流设施，由世界各地数百家机构的数千名研究人员和学生使用。它已经成为网络研究社区的中心资源。除了设备本身提供的服务外，Emulab团队在回答问题和解决问题方面的响应能力也受到了普遍的赞扬。Emulab不仅是一个非常成功的设备，它还是一个软件：一个控制网络和分布式系统实验的“操作系统”。该软件在很大程度上没有变化，正在运行20多个其他试验台站点，包括面向威慑安全的试验台。需要大量熟练的开发和运营时间来处理不断变化的需求，并支持设施的用户和其他Emulab设施。此项目支持这些人员成本的很大一部分。此建议的智力优势在于找到方法来持续发展Emulab软件基础，同时保持其全天候运行。这样做还具有挑战性，因为单独的工作将联合Emulab与其他试验台。这一提议的更广泛影响将是使数千名研究人员、学生和数百个研究项目能够运行以网络为导向的实验，否则这些实验是不可能的。

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.