AERPAW (Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless) is an NSF-funded advanced wireless research testbed led by NC State University as part of the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program. AERPAW provides researchers with a platform for experimenting with advanced wireless communications and autonomous systems, particularly applications involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and mobility. The platform combines a Digital Twin environment and a physical outdoor testbed. AERPAW also hosts the North American Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC) in the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle Park Area.

ARA1 is an at-scale platform for advanced wireless research, being deployed across the Iowa State University (ISU) campus, City of Ames (where ISU resides), and surrounding research and producer farms as well as rural communities in central Iowa, spanning a rural area with diameter over 60km. It serves as a wireless living lab for smart and connected rural communities, enabling the research and development of rural-focused wireless technologies that provide affordable, high-capacity connectivity to rural communities and industries such as agriculture.  

Chameleon is a large-scale, deeply reconfigurable experimental platform built to support computer science systems research, education, and emerging applications. Community projects range from developing new operating systems, virtualization methods, performance variability studies, and power management to software-defined networking, artificial intelligence, and resource management. As of May 2026, Chameleon has supported 14,500+ users working on 1,300+ projects, resulting in 1000+ research publications since July 2015 when the project first became operational.

To support experiments of such variety, Chameleon supports a bare metal reconfiguration system giving users full control of the software stack including root privileges, kernel customization, and console access. While most Chameleon resources are configured in this way, a small amount is configured as a virtualized KVM cloud to balance the need for finer-grained resource sharing sufficient for some projects with coarse-grained and stronger isolation properties of bare metal. 

Chameleon hardware (see our discovery system for an up-to-date, detailed description) balances the need to support experiments at scale and the need for diversity. The need for scale is satisfied by a large-scale homogenous partition of nearly 15,000 cores, 5PB of total disk space, hosted across three main sites, the University of Chicago (CHI@UC), the Texas Advanced Computing Center (CHI@TACC), and the National Center for Atmospheric Resarch (CHI@NCAR), connected by 100 Gbps network. The diversity of hardware configurations and architectures is reflected by support for innovative networking solutions including reconfigurable Corsa switches and support for Infiniband support for accelerators such as FPGAs and a range of different GPU technologies, storage hierarchies with a mix of HDDs, SDDs, VRAM, x86 technologies, and non-x86 architectures such as ARMs. 

Unlike traditional computer science experimental systems which have overwhelmingly been configured by in-house infrastructures, Chameleon adapted OpenStack, a mainstream open source cloud technology, to provide its capabilities. This has a range of practical benefits including familiar interfaces for users and operators, workforce development potential, leverage of contributions by a community of 2,000 developers strong, and the potential to contribute to infrastructure used by millions of users (in particular, Chameleon team contributions to OpenStack include the Blazar component). In addition, configuring the infrastructure as a cloud also provides a direct answer in the debate of whether computer science systems research can be supported on clouds – as well as the means to influence that answer through direct mainstream contributions.

Cloud Enhanced Open Software Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment

The COSMOS project is aimed at design, development, and deployment of a city-scale advanced wireless testbed in order to support real-world experimentation on next-generation wireless technologies and applications.

The COSMOS architecture has a particular focus on ultra-high bandwidth and low latency wireless communication tightly coupled with edge cloud computing. The COSMOS testbed will be deployed in upper Manhattan and will consist of 40-50 advanced software-defined radio nodes along with fiber-optic front-haul and back-haul networks and edge and core cloud computing infrastructure. Researchers will be able to run experiments remotely on the COSMOS testbed by logging into a web-based portal which will provide various facilities for experiment execution, measurements, and data collection.

Cryptolets is an NSF-funded project developing a reusable hardware platform for cryptographic computing. The project focuses on modular accelerator components that can be composed as chiplets to support evolving cryptographic protocols without requiring a new monolithic design for each workload. These components span the core arithmetic and computational structures needed by modern privacy-preserving and verifiable computing systems. Cryptolets also develops formal verification methods to establish strong correctness guarantees for individual components and their composition. The project combines hardware architecture, chiplet integration, verification, and open-source infrastructure into a common design framework. The goal is to make cryptographic acceleration easier to build, evaluate, reuse, and deploy across a broad range of secure computing applications.

EduceLab is a highly specialized heritage science laboratory expertly designed to provide data-intensive yet object-centric solutions to the most challenging problems in the study of cultural heritage. Its unique ecosystem of non-destructive instrumentation offers key scientific capabilities that are crucial to addressing the challenging variability of heritage science contexts. These capabilities include:

• Materials characterization

• Advanced multimodal imaging (tomography, photography, photogrammetry) with gold standard bench equipment as well as a flexible, configurable prototype environment

• Cyberinfrastructure and methodologies for capturing, structuring, processing, and mining large-scale data sets

• Mobile and flexibly-deployed instrumentation for in-situ data acquisition and on-site evaluations

EduceLab comprises four operational clusters – BENCH, MOBILE, FLEX, and CYBER. Each one is based on usage patterns that match the needs of diverse heritage science communities.

FABRIC (FABRIC is Adaptive Programmable Research Infrastructure for Computer Science and Science Applications) is an International infrastructure that enables cutting-edge experimentation and research at-scale in the areas of networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing, storage, virtual reality, 5G, machine learning, and science applications. FABRIC is designed for users to prototype and validate novel network and computing solutions that are impossible or impractical with the current Internet.

The FABRIC infrastructure is a distributed set of equipment at commercial collocation spaces, national labs and campuses. Each FABRIC site has large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It also connects to specialized testbeds (5G/IoT PAWR, NSF Clouds), the Internet and high-performance computing facilities to create a rich environment for a wide variety of experimental activities.

Powerful large-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as Large Language Models (LLMs) herald a new era of AI that is poised to reshape society, but scientists cannot explain their predictions. The NSF National Deep Inference Fabric (NDIF) is a research computing project that enables researchers and students to crack open the mysteries inside these enormous neural networks.

Because large-scale AI systems are trained automatically using massive amounts of data — instead of being designed line-by-line by a programmer — the internal workings of the current generation of AI are inscrutable to humans. Understanding how these systems work is an emerging science. But performing science on the internals of such large-scale AI systems requires substantial computational resources that are not practical at institutional scale, because the infrastructure required to study the detailed computations of AI differs from the computing systems used for ordinary commercial deployment of AI.

NDIF addresses this critical need by creating a unique nationwide research computing fabric that enables scientists to perform transparent and reproducible experiments on the largest-scale open AI systems. NDIF will advance our nation's understanding of the capabilities of large-scale AI systems, as well as their limitations, robustness, safety issues, and impacts on human society.

The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program is enabling experimental exploration of new wireless devices, communication techniques, networks, systems, and services that will revolutionize the nation’s wireless ecosystem while sustaining US leadership and economic competitiveness for decades to come.

The PAWR Project Office manages this $100 million program, which was created by NSF. It includes four large-scale wireless testbeds – POWDER, COSMOS, AERPAW, and ARA – and the modular SDR Houdini project.

Powder (the Platform for Open Wireless Data-driven Experimental Research) is flexible infrastructure enabling a wide range of software-defined experiments on the future of wireless networks.

Powder supports software-programmable experimentation on 5G and beyond, ORAN, spectrum sharing and CBRS, RF monitoring, and anything else that can be supported on software-defined radios.

Quori 2.0 (CIRC)

The Sage Grande Testbed (SGT) is building a cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) cyberinfrastructure to support advanced AI research.

SGT, funded by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, provides access to AI-enabled edge computing resources and software tools integrated with sensors—including infrared and RGB cameras, microphones, and a variety of atmospheric and air quality instruments—deployed across natural, urban, and wildfire-prone environments, with networking capabilities that support real-time hazard reporting.

By bringing advanced AI to the edge, where data is collected, full-resolution analysis, dynamic automation, and immediate actionable responses can be computed. Each Sage node includes a GPU and AI-optimized software stack connected to instruments such as infrared cameras, RGB cameras, LiDAR, and traditional sensors for air quality and wind, as well as LoRaWAN connected sensors for low-bandwidth measurements such as soil moisture. With over 100 Sage nodes deployed across 17 states, SGT provides a national-scale testbed for AI-enabled, autonomous, and rapid-response science and sustained observation of ecological systems, agriculture, urban environments, and weather-related hazards.

SPHERE (Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation) is a public research testbed funded by the NSF and constructed by the USC Information Sciences Institute, Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences, and the University of Utah Kahlert School of Computing. It supports integrated, reproducible cybersecurity and privacy research through access to diverse, user-configurable hardware, software, and networking resources via six specialized user portals. It aims to transform cybersecurity and privacy research, enabling representative, sophisticated, and reproducible experimentation that allows researchers to build on the work of their peers, thus supercharging scientific progress. In addition to scientific experimentation, SPHERE enables a broad range of activities including education, workforce training, cybersecurity exercises, and rigorous test and evaluation.