In DeterLab, research teams work together to construct and analyze experiments using a variety of basic resources that are operated and supported by DETER Project staff staff at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and the University of California at Berkeley.

Network facilities are the foundation required to build the network basis of an experiment. DeterLab includes:

• Various local area network infrastructure elements and options at both DeterLab locations;
• Wide area networking between those locations;
• Capability to integrate into experiments one or more third-party network and computing facilities.

To create nodes in an experiment's network, there are many computing facilities at both locations, including over 400 high-capacity multi-core server nodes, each with multiple 1-gigabyte connections. There is a wide array of options for configuration of these nodes, each of which can be loaded with any of several existing host operating system and application software stacks, virtual machine monitors, VMs, network emulation elements, and network simulators.

To assemble and use these resources, DeterLab has a workbench for creating and managing experiments, including:

• A repository of archived experiment fixtures, such as network definitions, real and virtual hosts, instrumentation software, and software configurations;
• Tools for creating new experiment fixtures, for copying and modifying archived fixtures, and for combining them to define the infrastructure for a specific experiment;
• Networking and computing management facilities to allocate DeterLab resources to be the infrastructure for a running experiment.

The workbench also includes features for operating an experiment: starting, checkpointing, stopping and re-starting an experiment. These features enable several types of experiment operation activities:

• Instrumentation and observation of running experiments;
• Human intervention or activity in an experiment;
• Experimental data extraction and results analysis;
• Controlled interaction between a running experiment and live systems on public networks.

DeterLab also includes adminstrative tools for project leaders to manage groups of researchers collaborating on a project, including user roles, user management, experiment storage and archiving, and project management.