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 universally available time- and space-shared network emulator which achieves new levels of ease of use. Several hundred 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; Emulab can load ten or a hundred disks in less than two minutes. Emulab strives to preserve the control and ease of use of simulation, without sacrificing the realism of emulation and live network experimentation.
