Reinventing the lab

In the modern world, the rate of scientific progress continues to accelerate, helping to tackle the most pressing challenges in medicine, agriculture, materials, and energy. Scientific laboratories are struggling to keep up. Despite being the heart of scientific research, their design has remained largely unchanged for decades and is now a drag on progress. Laboratory work is often slow, expensive, difficult to standardize and difficult to scale. Cloud labs centralize and share laboratory resources and allow fully remote multi-tenant access to scientists from anywhere in the world, with the potential of becoming a tool which accelerates, rather than hinders scientific progress.

Developed by Emerald Cloud Lab Inc. over the last 15 years, Symbolic Lab Language (SLL) is an open-source programming language built to power fully remote cloud-lab operation and experimental control.

Operating in vast centralized laboratories, SLL has successfully orchestrated over 1 million experimental protocols as of 2025, processed millions of samples and accumulated millions of data objects encoding scientific results. The language harnesses over 400 unique scientific instrumentation models from across all major manufacturers, including Hamilton Company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Danaher Corporation (& affiliates), PerkinElmer, Bruker Corporation, Agilent Technologies as well as over 100 others. Many of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies have already experimented with SLL-powered laboratory work, including Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck & Co., Eli Lilly, Amgen, CSL Behring and Biogen, as well as top national and university labs including Argonne National Laboratory, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

This book provides the definitive guide to Symbolic Lab Language (SLL), the first and most widely used programming language for cloud labs, detailing its current documentation and capabilities, with the aim of cementing SLL as the foundational language for laboratory operation.