A few months ago, we announced a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science — with the goal of communicating to undergraduates what computing research is all about. The first of these videos, titled Exploring PhotoBios, debuted in mid-June.

Today I’m pleased to present the second of these videos — about Seattle, a new testbed platform that allows researchers to access computational resources on a wide variety of devices and machines provided by everyday users.

Users today are increasingly running applications on devices like cell phones and tablets. Similarly, companies are increasingly moving services to separately managed services like the cloud or content distribution networks (CDNs). However, researchers in academia have limited access to these environments which makes it difficult to innovate and understand these areas.

With Seattle, a user runs the Seattle software on their device and it executes researcher code in a safe, performance-isolated manner while the user performs his or her usual tasks on the device. Researchers get access to a virtualized environment containing resources including CPU, memory, disk, and network access.

The Seattle testbed has already been used in about 20 classes around the world and has more than 1,000 registered developers. Currently, more than 4,000 machines are running the Seattle software — and most of these are home computers!

Check out the video about Seattle after the jump…

…and for more information about the project, click here.

Also, a friendly reminder that we’re always on the lookout for cool research videos like this one, so please click here to learn how you can get involved in this effort — and make $1,000 in the process!

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)