Many of the ideas that drive modern cloud computing, such as server virtualization, network slicing, and robust distributed storage, arose from the research community. Despite this success, today’s clouds have become environments that are unsuitable for moving this research agenda forward—they have particular, unmalleable implementations of these ideas “baked in.” CloudLab will not be a cloud; it will be large-scale, distributed scientific infrastructure on top of which many different clouds can be built.

POWDER (the Platform for Open Wireless Data-driven Experimental Research) is a facility for experimenting on the future of wireless networking in a city-scale “living laboratory.” Visit the POWDER portal.

In the TCloud project we are developing a self-defending, self-evolving, and self-accounting trustworthy cloud platform. Our approach in realizing TCloud holds to the following five tenets: defense in depth, least authority, explicit orchestration of security function, moving-target defense, and verifiable accountability.

This project is developing new techniques for the creation of highly effective fuzz testers (fuzzers) for compilers and interpreters. Our goal is to reduce the time and human effort needed to create sophisticated fuzzers for programming language implementations. Our new techniques are being embodied in a new generator of fuzz testers, called Xsmith.

Emulab is a network testbed, giving researchers a wide range of environments in which to develop, debug, and evaluate their systems. The Emulab facility at the University of Utah has over 600 PCs, a hundred wireless devices, and dozens of switches. It is used by thousands of researchers at hundreds of institutions worldwide. The software that we built to run Emulab is open source, and is used as part of dozens of network testbeds across the globe.