The USENIX Software Tools Award recognizes significant contributions to the community that reflect the spirit and character demonstrated by those who came together in the Software Tools User Group. Recipients of the award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to the reusable code-base available to all and/or the provision of a significant enabling technology to users in a widely available form.
This year’s USENIX Software Tools Award has been presented to UW CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alumnus) Tom Anderson and his colleagues Mic Bowman, David Culler, Larry Peterson, and Mothy Roscoe for the creation of PlanetLab.
The citation reads: “The 2014 STUG Award goes to Tom Anderson, Mic Bowman, David Culler, Larry Peterson, and Timothy Roscoe for PlanetLab. PlanetLab enables multiple distributed services to run over a shared, wide-area infrastructure. The PlanetLab software system introduced distributed virtualization (aka “slicing”), unbundled management (where management services run within their own slices), and chain of responsibility (mediating between slice users and infrastructure owners). The PlanetLab experimental platform consists of 1186 machines at 582 sites that run this software to enable researchers to evaluate ideas in a realistic environment and offer long-running services (e.g., content distribution networks) for real users. The PlanetLab software package has been adopted, and extended, by numerous other projects (e.g., OneLab, CoreLab, G-Lab, VINI, M-Lab, VICCI, and OpenCloud).”
Congratulations Tom (and Mic, David, Larry, and Mothy)! (Read about it on the USENIX website here.)