Terminology
Treamill is a distributed system composed of multiple different components. While individual deployments may differ and feature different sets of components, this guide establishes the following general terminology:
The Treadmill testbed / the Treadmill system
Describes the overall Treadmill system, including all deployments and central components. Excludes external actors, such as users or platforms that interact with the Treadmill system.
Device Under Test / DUT
A chip, board, or other device that can be programmed, debugged, interacted with, or otherwise controlled by users or the Treadmill testbed. Typically, DUTs will be development boards that feature microcontrollers or SoCs, like a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840DK board.
Site
A collection of DUTs and other shared, non-global infrastructure. A site has one or more DUTs, companion software and hardware per DUT, and also includes central software or hardware components shared among DUTs.
Deployment
A physical deployment of a part of a Treadmill system, hosting one or more DUTs. A deployment may consist of multiple Treadmill sites. A deployment is not a concept used in the Treadmill system itself, but used in these and other documents to denote parts of the Treadmill system that are in physically distinct locations and/or under differing administrative control.
Switchboard
The single, centralized controller of a Treadmill testbed. A single Switchboard instance coordinates and orchestrates workloads across multiple Treadmill sites. It also implements central authentication and authorization mechanisms and is the authoritative data source for many of these subsystems.
Supervisor
A supervisor is responsible for managing interactions with a DUT and runs on site-local infrastructure. Examples are QEMU supervisors that manage virtual machines connected to a DUT, or Netboot Supervisors that exercise control over other hosts connected to a DUT. Supervisors connect to and are managed by the Switchboard.
Host
A device or environment exposed to users of the Treadmill system, connected to a DUT. Hosts can be virtual machines, dedicated hardware hosts, containers, or other environments. Hosts run software that is able to interact with and control a DUT. Each Host is managed by a Supervisor.