Experimentation Platforms

Research testbeds sit in well-connected places that look nothing like where users actually are. This project built measurement systems that run inside applications on real home connections — NEWS, which detected network events by watching ordinary peer-to-peer traffic, and Dasu, which characterized broadband service and then opened that vantage point to other researchers as an experimentation platform.

Dasu answered a question users cared about — is my ISP giving me what I pay for? — and used the adoption that earned to build something researchers needed: a measurement platform running on tens of thousands of real home connections, able to host other people’s experiments.

Running an experiment across hundreds of PlanetLab nodes meant bootstrapping each one, installing packages, deploying files and issuing commands — repeatedly, in parallel, and with some way of finding out what failed. Nixes was the set of bash scripts that made that routine.