The POWDER Manual

2026-10-07 (583a9ef)

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The POWDER Manual🔗

The Powder Team

Powder is a facility for experimenting on the future of wireless networking in a city-scale "living laboratory" environment. It was one of the first two platforms funded by the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), receiving support from NSF grants CNS-1827940 and CNS-2346555.

Powder is developed, deployed, and operated by the University of Utah, in partnership with the RENEW team at Rice University.

The Powder facility is built on top of Emulab and is run by the Flux Research Group, part of the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah.

1 Powder Overview

1.1 What is Powder

1.2 Powder status

1.3 Roadmap to using Powder

2 Getting Started

3 Powder starter profiles

4.1 Register for an Account

4.1.1 Join an existing project

4.1.2 Create a new project

4.1.3 Setting up SSH access

4.1.4 Setting up X11

5 Powder and Repeatable Research

6 Basic Concepts

6.2 Experiments

6.2.1 Reserving Resources for Experiments

6.2.2 Extending Experiments

6.4 Physical Resources

6.5 Virtual Machines

7 Resource Reservations

7.1 What Reservations Guarantee

7.2 How Reservations May Affect You

7.3 Making a Reservation

7.4 Using a Reservation

7.5 Who Shares Access to Reservations

8 Creating Profiles

8.1 Creating a profile from an existing one

8.1.1 Copying a Profile

8.1.2 Creating the Profile

8.1.3 Updating a profile

8.2 Capturing Disk Images for Profiles

8.3 Repository-Based Profiles

8.3.1 Updating Repository-Based Profiles

8.3.2 Branches and Tags in Repository-Based Profiles

8.4 Sharing Profiles

8.5 Versioned Profiles

9.1 Radio monitoring

9.1.1 Conducted RF

9.1.2 Radiated RF

9.1.3 Massive MIMO

10 Using Powder: From simulation, to emulation, to over-the-air

10.1 Simulated RF Experimentation

10.2 Conducted RF Environment

10.3 Using the Indoor Over-The-Air Lab

10.4 Outdoor Over-The-Air Environment

10.4.1 Step-by-step walkthrough

10.4.2 Some Important Notes

10.5 Next Steps

11 Using radios on Powder

11.1 COTS Radios

11.1.1 COTS O-RU devices

11.1.2 Management of O-RU devices on Powder

11.2 Software Defined Radios

11.2.1 SDRs on POWDER

11.2.2 SDR Capabilities and Limitations

11.2.3 SDR Calibration

11.2.4 Working With Powder Custom RF Front-Ends

11.2.5 Powder Custom RF Front-End Details

11.3 Radio Synchronization

12 Describing a profile with python and geni-lib

12.1 A single XEN VM node

12.2 A single physical host

12.3 Two XenVM nodes with a link between them

12.4 Two ARM64 servers in a LAN

12.5 A VM with a custom size

12.6 Set a specific IP address on each node

12.7 RF communication

12.8 Specify an operating system and set install and execute scripts

12.9 Profiles with user-specified parameters

12.10 Add storage to a node

12.11 Debugging geni-lib profile scripts

13 Storage Mechanisms

13.1 Overview of Storage Mechanisms

13.2 Node-Local Storage

13.2.1 Specifying Storage in a Profile – Local Datasets

13.2.2 Allocating Storage in a Running Experiment

13.2.3 Persisting Local Data

13.3 Image-backed Datasets

13.4 Remote Datasets

13.5 NFS Shared Filesystems

13.6 Write-back Storage for Fixed and Mobile Endpoints

13.7 High-performance Storage for Streaming Data

13.7.1 Using CephFS in an Experiment

13.7.2 Limitations and Guidelines for CephFS Usage.

13.8 Storage Type Summary (TL;DR)

13.9 Example Storage Profiles

13.9.1 Creating a Node-local Dataset

13.9.2 Creating an Image-backed Dataset from a Node-local Dataset

13.9.3 Using and Updating an Image-backed Dataset

13.9.4 Creating a Remote Dataset

13.9.5 Using a Remote Dataset on a Single Node

13.9.6 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via a Shared Filesystem

13.9.7 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via Clones

14 The Control Network

14.2 Ensuring your experiment nodes use the correct interfaces

14.2.1 Common causes of control network misuse

14.2.2 Empirically verifying interface use

14.3 What to do if you get a Control Network Violation email

14.4 Why is it so important to avoid the control network?

14.5 When can I use the control network?

15 Advanced Topics

15.1 Disk Images

15.3 Public IP Access

15.3.1 Dynamic Public IP Addresses

15.5 Introspection

15.5.1 Client ID

15.5.2 Control MAC

15.5.3 Manifest

15.5.4 Private key

15.5.5 Profile parameters

15.6 User-controlled switches and layer-1 topologies

15.7 Portal API

15.8 Legacy Portal API

16 Virtual Machines

16.1.1 Controlling CPU and Memory

16.1.2 Controlling Disk Space

16.1.3 Setting HVM Mode

16.1.4 Dedicated and Shared VMs

17 Automating Experiment Configuration

17.1 Configuration Management: Ansible

17.2 Ansible in Profiles: geni-lib extensions

17.3 Bootstrapping Ansible in Experiments

17.4 Using Ansible in Experiments

17.4.1 Per-experiment Ansible Facts

17.4.2 emulab-common Ansible Roles

17.4.3 Using emulab-common Roles

17.5 Example: OpenZMS profile

17.6 Example: Kubernetes profile

17.7 Example: workflow-manager profile

18 Hardware and Wireless Environments

18.1 Conducted attenuator matrix resources

18.2 Paired Radio workbench resources

18.3 Indoor OTA lab resources

18.4 Rooftop site resources

18.5 Dense-deployment site resources

18.6 Fixed-endpoint resources

18.7 Mobile-endpoint resources

18.8 Near-edge computing resources

18.9 Cloud computing resources

19 Powder basic srsLTE Tutorial

19.1 Objectives

19.2 Prerequisites

19.3 Logging In

19.4 Creating a simple srsLTE experiment

19.5 Exploring Your Experiment

19.5.1 Experiment Status

19.5.2 Profile Instructions

19.5.3 Topology View

19.5.4 List View

19.5.5 Manifest View

19.5.6 Graphs View

19.5.8 Web-based Shell

19.6 Using the srsLTE tools

19.7 Digging deeper

19.8 Terminating the Experiment

19.9 Taking Next Steps

20 Powder OAI Tutorial

20.1 Objectives

20.2 Prerequisites

20.3 Logging In

20.4 Building Your Own OAI Network

20.5 Exploring Your Experiment

20.5.1 Experiment Status

20.5.2 Profile Instructions

20.5.3 Topology View

20.5.4 List View

20.5.5 Manifest View

20.5.6 Graphs View

20.5.8 Web-based Shell

20.6 Starting OAI Services

20.7 Connecting the UE

20.8 In-Depth OAI Profile Documentation

20.9 Terminating the Experiment

20.10 Taking Next Steps

21 Powder OpenStack Tutorial

21.1 Objectives

21.2 Prerequisites

21.3 Logging In

21.4 Building Your Own OpenStack Cloud

21.5 Exploring Your Experiment

21.5.1 Experiment Status

21.5.2 Profile Instructions

21.5.3 Topology View

21.5.4 List View

21.5.5 Manifest View

21.5.6 Graphs View

21.5.8 Web-based Shell

21.5.9 Serial Console

21.6 Bringing up Instances in OpenStack

21.7 Administering OpenStack

21.7.1 Log Into The Control Nodes

21.7.2 Reboot the Compute Node

21.8 Terminating the Experiment

21.9 Taking Next Steps

22 Citing Powder

23 Getting Help

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