In Memoriam We are sad to report that Jay Lepreau, Research Professor and Director of the Flux Research Group, passed away Monday morning Sept 15th due to complications of cancer. Jay was an enthusiastic and productive researcher, a dedicated mentor of students and staff, and an avid participant in recreational activities such as music and outdoor sports. His loss will be felt by all who knew him, both within the computer science community and elsewhere.

Please be assured that we plan to carry on the vision for Emulab that we shared with Jay, and that operation and development of the Utah Emulab facility and the Emulab software will continue.

Emulab is a network testbed, giving researchers a wide range of environments in which to develop, debug, and evaluate their systems. The name Emulab refers both to a facility and to a software system. The primary Emulab installation is run by the Flux Group, part of the School of Computing at the University of Utah. There are also installations of the Emulab software at more than two dozen sites around the world, ranging from testbeds with a handful of nodes up to testbeds with hundreds of nodes. Emulab is widely used by computer science researchers in the fields of networking and distributed systems. It is also designed to support education, and has been used to teach classes in those fields.

Emulab is a public facility, available without charge to most researchers worldwide. If you are unsure if you qualify for use, please see our policies document, or ask us. If you think you qualify, you can apply to start a new project.

Emulab provides integrated access to a wide range of experimental environments:

Emulation

An emulated experiment allows you to specify an arbitrary network topology, giving you a controllable, predictable, and repeatable environment, including PC nodes on which you have full "root" access, running an operating system of your choice.

Live-Internet Experimentation

Using the RON and PlanetLab testbeds, Emulab provides you with a full-featured environment for deploying, running, and controlling your application at hundreds of sites around the world.

802.11 Wireless

Emulab's 802.11a/b/g testbed is deployed on multiple floors of an office building. Nodes are under your full control and may act as access points, clients, or in ad-hoc mode. All nodes have two wireless interfaces, plus a wired control network.

Software-Defined Radio

USRP devices from the GNU Radio project give you control over Layer 1 of a wireless network - everything from signal processing up is done in software.

Sensor Networks

Emulab's sensor network testbed includes 25 Mica2 motes. All motes are equipped with a serial port, for maximum control and debugging capability.

Mobile Wireless

A fleet of six Garcia robots from Acroname are equipped with Stargate single-board computers and Mica2 motes. These robots have full mobility within our sensor network testbed.

Simulation

Using NSE, ns-2's emulation facility, simulated networks can interact with real networks; not only the emulator, but any network resource in Emulab.

Emulab unifies all of these environments under a common user interface, and integrates them 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 resources.

Links to help you get started:

• Authorization Scheme, Policy, and "How To Get Started"
• Overview of Installed Software
• Hardware Overview, "Emulab Classic"
• Security Issues
• Administrative Policies and Disclaimer