A group of universities and vendors are teaming on a new research network they say could pave the way to the Internet of the future.
PlanetLab, with about 60 academic institution members and the backing of technology heavyweights HP and Intel, is building a worldwide research network over the Internet. Participating schools include Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Stanford.
The goal is to provide a space to test disruptive technologies that will enable the Internet to develop further. PlanetLab is a network of computers, linked by the Internet, on which researchers can test distributed, networked applications and services such as search engines, or new routing and naming protocols.
“The research community is full of ideas about new services they want to deploy. . . . The problem is, there is a very high barrier to entry,” says Larry Peterson, professor of computer science at Princeton and director of PlanetLab.
The barrier is the cost to build such a network, which is why the group went with an overlay approach. PlanetLab’s network consists of 160 servers, at 65 sites in 16 countries.
While similar to Internet2 in that both projects foster the advancement of cutting-edge technology, PlanetLab’s goal is to let researchers test their projects over a “real” network with outages and downtime, Peterson says. Internet2’s Abilene network spans only the U.S. and connects most sites using high-bandwidth dedicated lines. Abilene is a separate backbone that doesn’t depend on the Internet.
PlanetLab’s global network uses a combination of low-speed and high-bandwidth connections to the Internet for real-world application and service testing, Peterson says. The network is restricted to research organizations that “contribute nodes” to the network and maintain those servers, he says.
Many fields of research could be opened by PlanetLab, says David Culler, a professor in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and academic director of Intel Research at Berkeley.
“People are looking at distributed search engines,” he says. “Distributed storage is particularly interesting as you start to integrate that with various kinds of sensors streaming information from the physical world.”
Enhancing multi-player games is another potential application, but Culler says “we believe the most important ones are the ones we haven’t seen yet because people haven’t had the tools available.”
The group expects its network will grow aggressively to 300 nodes by year-end and to 1,000 nodes within two years. The servers PlanetLab uses are based on Intel’s Pentium III processor and run a customized version of Red Hat’s Linux operating system. “It’s convenient to get things running quickly, and a lot of the research community uses Linux,” Peterson says.
Intel Research has donated 100 servers to the project. HP is donating 30. Both vendors have active experimental PlanetLab projects underway (see story, “Researchers spawn innovative net” .)
Peter Sayer from IDG News Service contributed to this story.
