COLLOQUIUM
             Computer Science Department, Boston University

Speaker: Jay Lepreau
         University of Utah

Date:  Wednesday, May 4
Time:  15:00
Place: Room MCS 135, 111 Cummington Street 
       (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium)

Title: The Emulab Network Testbed:
            Under the Hood, Problems, and Future Directions

Abstract:

Emulab is a software system for controlling experimentation in
networking and distributed systems.  Emulab's primary goals include
ease of use, control, realism, and support for diverse technologies.
Key to achieving these are providing operating system-like services,
such as resource allocation and scheduling, and by consistent use of
virtualization and abstraction.  Emulab is a production system: the
Utah site supports 10 types of devices, including mobile wireless
robots, and has over 1000 registered users who ran 13,000 experiments
last year.

This talk outlines Emulab's overall design and will go into detail on
some of the key research challenges.  One challenge is the NP-hard
problem of mapping the virtual resources specified by the experimenter
to available physical resources.  Another is fast distribution of
entire disk images to hundreds of machines.  Our answer to the latter
includes domain-specific compression, a custom application-level
reliable multicast protocol, and flexible application-level framing.
Finally, I will outline some open problems, recent work, and future
directions.

Host: John Byers