CHI-in-a-Box: Reducing Operational Costs of Research Testbeds

Making scientific instruments for computer science research available and open to all is more important than ever given the constantly increasing pace of opportunity and innovation – yet, such instruments are expensive to build and operate given their complexity and need for rapid evolution to keep pace with the advancing frontier of science. This paper describes how we can lower the cost of computer science testbeds by making them easier to deploy and operate. We present CHI-in-a-Box, a packaging of CHameleon Infrastructure (CHI) underlying the Chameleon testbed, describe the practices that went into its design and implementation, and present three case studies of its use.