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Adminpolicies

Administrative Policies

Administrative Policies

Most any legitimate research/experimental use is allowed, including use by companies. Of course, when demand exceeds supply we will have to assign priorities to projects, but the hardware base will be expanding. Due to limited resources and other issues, we currently allow only research use of the wide-area nodes; educational and development use are not permitted.

Acceptable Use, Allocation Priority, Reporting, Governance, Disclaimer

Our current and anticipated policies follow. We expect these to evolve as experience demands, and we are open to constructive suggestions concerning them.

Acceptable Use

In principle, almost any research or experimental use of the testbed by experimenters that have a need for it is appropriate.

"Abuse" of the facility or its other users, in any form, will of course result in termination of access. Abuse includes using the facility for other than a project's stated purpose.

Allocation Priority

When the testbed become oversubscribed we will be allocating its resources based on some function-- currently vague but in roughly this order-- of perceived research value and broader impact, the testbed's uniqueness as a suitable platform for the research, novelty as a testbed application, resources required (typically: number of nodes), experimenters' contribution to testbed software development, experimenters' lack of access to other appropriate facilities, sponsorship by our primary sponsors (currently NSF and Cisco), educational value, affiliation with an academic institution, whether the project is funded/peer-reviewed, and for commercial users, their willingness to help defray costs, i.e., pay.

Many development-oriented commercial experiments and evaluations will be allowed, but with lower priority.

Reporting

In order to assess the testbed's impact and report to our sponsors, we simply require notice of all publications or patents to which the testbed contributed. Formal acknowledgement in such publications is required as well, by citing the following paper:

An Integrated Experimental Environment for Distributed Systems and Networks, by White, Lepreau, Stoller, Ricci, Guruprasad, Newbold, Hibler, Barb, and Joglekar, appeared at OSDI 2002, December 2002.

You can use this BibTex entry to cite Netbed/Emulab. Finally, we will be soliciting feedback and suggestions from our users.

Governance

An administrative board, including representatives from our major sponsors, will be involved in setting broad policy and have review authority. Typically, a small executive committee composed of members from the University of Utah Flux research group will decide most resource allocation issues.

A Technical Advisory Board is also being formed, containing distinguished members of the network and distributed systems research communities.

Disclaimer

We are providing broad access to the testbed in the hopes that it will be useful, but we do so WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

WE DISCLAIM ALL LIABILITY from errors in results or security breaches resulting from emulab's use. The system has been in production use for over a year, but is constantly undergoing rapid development, so significant amounts of code are always new. We make an effort to provide inter-project security, but users must realize that high security is unlikely in i) such a new and rapidly evolving system, ii) where users have such complete control over hardware and software resources, and iii) in such a public facility that will attract attack.