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.
### 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](http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/netbed-osdi02-base.html), by White, Lepreau, Stoller, Ricci, Guruprasad, Newbold, Hibler, Barb, and Joglekar, appeared at [OSDI 2002](http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi02/), December 2002.
You can use this **[BibTex entry](http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/netbed-osdi02.bib)** 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
