I am comparing my own telemetry-placement heuristic ("flowrank") against a betweenness-centrality baseline, using the CloudLab public profile tcts-fault-localization as the evaluation harness. The profile generates identifiability verdicts (fully / partially / ambiguous / unidentifiable + abstention) for its registered graph families; my heuristic is scored against the same frozen endpoints as the profile's own baseline.
The profile is the first public harness I found that (a) freezes its acceptance thresholds ahead of time and (b) refuses to answer when the configuration is unidentifiable. The abstention behavior is the reason I trust its verdicts at all: an evaluator that says "I don't know" at B=2 does not quietly lie to you at B=16.
| Family | betweenness baseline (C3 ratio) | flowrank (mine) | delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| H1 (mesh) | 0.31 | 0.27 | better |
| H2 (geo) | 0.29 | 0.26 | better |
| H3 (mesh) | 0.33 | 0.30 | better |
| H4 (fan-in) | 0.41 | 0.46 | worse |
| H5 (chain) | 0.36 | 0.32 | better |
| H6 (tree) | 0.38 | 0.34 | better |
| H7 (mesh) | 0.30 | 0.28 | better |
| H8 (public overlay) | 0.34 | 0.31 | better |
Takeaway: flowrank beats the baseline on 5 of 8 families and is clearly worse on fan-in — which matches the profile's own documented boundary (leaf-side observations are mandatory there). That failure taught me more than the wins: my heuristic assumes information concentrates near high-flow nodes, which is false in fan-in topologies.
All 42 runs (cloudlab instantiation records, seeds, hashes) are linked from the manifest table below. Two runs were invalid (allocation loss) and are logged, not silently dropped.
| Batch | Window | Profile version | Runs | Manifest hash (first 12) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP-01 | 2026-01-19 → 01-30 | v1.0 | 18 | f3a91c04d7e2 |
| FP-02 | 2026-02-09 → 02-27 | v1.0 | 14 | b844e17a02c9 |
| FP-03 | 2026-03-09 → 03-20 | v1.0.1 | 10 | 7d20bf55e8a1 |
I found the profile by browsing the CloudLab public profile collection in January 2026. I have no relationship with the TCTS project team, their PI, or Weber State University; nothing was provided to me for this use. Contact: okafor.r@northeastern.edu.