Seattle

Noisebridge is a donor of resources to the Seattle project.

Seattle is a platform for networking and distributed systems research. It's free, community-driven, and offers a large deployment of computers spread across the world. Seattle works by operating on resources donated by users and institutions. It's currently targeted for use by educators teaching networking and distributed systems classes. The global distribution of the Seattle network provides the ability to use it in application contexts that include cloud computing, peer-to-peer networking, ubiquitous/mobile computing, and distributed systems.

Seattle runs on end user systems on diverse platforms in a safe and contained manner. Users install and run Seattle with little to no impact on system security and performance. Sandboxes are established on user's computer to limit the consumption of resources such as cpu, memory/disk usage, and network bandwidth. Programs are only allowed to operate inside of a sandbox, ensuring that other files and programs are the computer are kept private and safe. This allows researchers and students to safely run code without impacting performance or security.

Seattle is ideal for students, researchers, and companies that want to prototype and test code on testbeds that have varying scale, diversity, and topologies. The same code may easily be run on a variety of operating systems, architectures, and network environments to understand the performance as well as the dynamics of a distributed system. Seattle is also ideal for studying wide-area effects and characteristics that exist in the Internet. For example, path transitivity, latency and bandwidth variations, as well as availability can all be characterized with Seattle.

Users needing direct access to hardware, running code in C, etc. should look elsewhere. Offering these capabilities would make it difficult to ensure safety and performance isolation for end users.