CloudLab 2025 Year in Review:

This year, CloudLab users collectively ran 124,025 experiments using 14.3 million node-hours.

The busiest cluster on CloudLab was Utah, which accounted for 5M node-hours. Wisconsin accounted for 3.7M node-hours, and Clemson 2.6M node-hours.

5.140 users ran experiments, and they belonged to 1,175 projects. 307 of those projects were classes, accounting for 16.4% of node-hours.

Users published 79 papers that used CloudLab for evaluation, including at NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, USENIX Security, FAST, VLDB, ASPLOS, POPL, MICRO.

Thanks, and see you next year!

Emulab, the software on which CloudLab is built, is now 25 years old! The first users in our database were created on June 1, 2000! 🎉

Still going strong, and open source at https://gitlab.flux.utah.edu/emulab/emulab-devel

We are beginning our roll out of CloudLab Phase IV nodes at our Utah site, and the first 68 c6620 nodes are now available for allocation. These nodes each have one Intel Xeon Gold 5512U 28-Core CPU, 128GB DDR5 RAM across 8 channels, two 800GB Mixed-Use NVMe Gen 4 SSDs, and Intel E810-XXV 25Gb and E810-CQDA2 100Gb experiment interfaces. The remaining 64 c6620 nodes will become available over the coming weeks.

Be advised that due to an issue that we are still working on, these nodes will not have their 100Gb interface wired up right away. We will post an update once that has been resolved.

If you're at #NSDI24, we'll have a CloudLab Birds-of-a-Feather meeting on Wednesday at 8:00 (right after the poster session). Come join us in the Alameda Room to talk about CloudLab (and get stickers)!

If you're not familiar with BoF sessions: they're a chance for people with common interests to get together - just show up, no preparation or prior experience with CloudLab required.

Shape the future of CloudLab by taking this survey! https://utah.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0TB6jhNuOSEs0ZM

Hoping to get new hardware or features added to CloudLab? Tell us what you need by taking this survey.

The CloudLab team wants to prioritize your needs in coming updates to the testbed. You can ensure that you have access to the tools you need by sharing your experiences and opinions in this survey.

Research conducted on CloudLab has now been published in over 500 papers! To celebrate this milestone, here are some details about where those papers are published and how we find them.

CloudLab is used a lot in the systems, networking, distributed systems, and data management communities. For example, 25 papers at NSDI (distributed systems) have used CloudLab, 32 at VLDB and SIGMOD (data management), 27 at OSDI and SOSP (operating systems), 11 at SoCC (cloud computing), 10 at SIGCOMM (networking), and so on. We keep an up-to-date list at https://www.cloudlab.us/matched-papers.php and a summary on the front page of cloudlab.us .

To find papers that have used us, we match each of our users to their profiles on Scopus. We do periodic searches on Scopus for papers by those authors that cite our main papers (https://docs.cloudlab.us/cite.html). We then examine each paper by hand to make sure they actually used CloudLab for that specific work. This is not perfect, because Scopus doesn't index everything, some of our users may not cite us, etc. but we certainly find a lot of papers this way!

Many thanks to our users! Being able to point to all the great work done on the platform is very satisfying to us, and helps the NSF see the value that the community is getting out of the testbed!

If it seems like CloudLab has been very busy recently, that's because it has been! With classes, paper deadlines, etc. we hit almost 1,400 monthly active users for November.

As you can see in the graph, the number of active users tends to drop over the summer, during breaks, etc., so these are good times to run experiments if you're having trouble getting them in during the regular school calendar.

A new paper about the CloudLab community is now available. Check it out!

Johanna Cohoon, Kazi Sinthia Kabir, Tamanna Motahar, and Jason Wiese. 2023. Cultivating Altruism Around Computing Resources: Anticipation Work in a Scholarly Community. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW2, Article 336 (October 2023), 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610185