6 Powder and Repeatable Research

One of Powder’s key goals is to enable repeatable research—we aim to make it easier for researchers to get the same software and hardware environment so that they can repeat or build upon each others’ work.

Powder is designed as a scientific instrument. It gives full visibility into every aspect of the facility, and it’s designed to minimize the impact that simultaneous users have on each other. This means that researchers using Powder can fully understand why their systems behave the way they do, and can have confidence that the results that they gather are not artifacts of competition for shared hardware resources.

Powder profiles can also be published, giving other researchers the exact same environment—hardware and software—on which to repeat experiments and compare results.

By default Powder gives exclusive access to specific frequency resources to one experiment at a time.