[Planetlab-users] Flexlab, PlanetLab, Sirius

[Jay Lepreau]

I posted our upcoming NSDI paper on "Flexlab", which can combine
dedicated hosts from Emulab with live network conditions from PlanetLab:
   http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/flexlab-nsdi07-base.html

Results likely relevant to some of you gathering data on PlanetLab:
-BitTorrent download rates are 2.5x lower on plain PlanetLab than on
 Flexlab, and also 2.5x lower than on PlanetLab with "modified Sirius"
 (cpu reservation but no bandwidth reservation).
 We believe plain PlanetLab is the one that's wrong.

-The traces of individual BitTorrent client download rates on plain
 PlanetLab are much more clustered than we see with Sirius or Flexlab.
 Things are less dynamic.

If a few of you are eager to try Flexlab, which is running in alpha
version, we can try to accomodate you.