Electronics Research Group, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland

The University of Aberdeen is among the UK's top research universities, as noted in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) - a year long independent evaluation of the quality of research undertaken across Britain's universities.

The Electronics Research Group (ERG) of the School of Engineering part of the College of Physical Sciences at the University of Aberdeen performs research relating to the design, simulation, optimisation, and benchmarking of systems. It functions as one of the School of Engineering's Research Groups.

The research group operates its own dedicated research network. The testbed supports the work performed in the research laboratories and remote test sites. The prime use of the testbed is to investigate communications systems and identify potential performance problems, suggest appropriate techniques which may improve performance, and to analyse the impact of implementing specific techniques.

In order to perform this research, the research group runs a number of services including web, mail and DNS on Debian stable servers. We first began to use Debian on our mail and DNS servers in 2011 on sparc64 servers, although we are now almost entirely using amd64. The stability of Debian allows us to spend less time maintaining these supporting services and more time working on our research.

We have also used Debian stable and Debian testing in testbeds. The ease in which we can deploy a number of machines configured into the topology we need and be able to get to performing the actual research makes Debian perfect for this use. When we use Debian stable we can also know that other researchers will be able to more easily replicate our setup in order to reproduce our research.