November 2003
U of T signs on to PlanetLab test-bed for global networks
The University of Toronto is participating in a global test-bed project involving research into Internet systems, which could lead to new advances, such as new protection from viruses and giving the Internet a “memory” of content many generations into the future.
“PlanetLab” is an open, globally distributed test-bed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services.
There are currently more than 220 machines at 100 sites worldwide available to support both short-term experiments and long-running network services.
PlanetLab may lead to new ways of protecting the Internet from viruses and worms. It could also enable new capabilities, such as persistent storage, the idea of giving the Internet a "memory." For example, even though the original computer on which it was posted no longer exists, a piece of data could still be found 100 years from now.
To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton and the University of Washington have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.
PlanetLab creates a unique environment in which to conduct experiments at Internet Scale. The most obvious is that network services deployed on PlanetLab experience all of the behaviors of the real Internet where the only thing predictable is unpredictability (latency, bandwidth, paths taken).
A second advantage is that PlanetLab provides a diverse perspective on the Internet in terms of connection properties, network presence, and geographical location. The broad perspective on the Internet enables development and deployment of a new class of services that see the network from many different angles.
The Internet has been based on a small set of software protocols that direct routers inside the network to forward data from source to destination, while applications run on computers connected to the edges of the network. The simplicity of the software model enabled the Internet to rapidly scale into a critical global service; however, this success now makes it difficult to create and test new ways of protecting it from abuses, or from implementing innovative applications and services.
The PlanetLab concept was born when Intel researchers gathered a group of leading network and distributed systems researchers to discuss the implications of a new, emerging class of global services and applications on the Internet.
This new class of services is designed to operate as "overlay" networks, which have emerged as a way of adding new capabilities to the Internet. The concept of an overlay or "on top of" approach might be familiar from textbooks where additional details are added to an image by laying a transparent sheet containing new graphics on top of an existing page.
These applications are decentralized, with pieces running on many machines spread across the global Internet, they can self-organize to form their own networks, and include some form of application processing inside the network (instead of at the edges), adding new intelligence and capabilities to the Internet.
Although several Canadian researchers are already involved with PlanetLab, CANARIE and ORION would like to encourage more. Intel Corp. has donated 12 PlanetLab servers to be located at CA*net 4 routing nodes across the country, and the systems are being installed.
University of Toronto PlanetLab researchers include Jiang Guo, Baochun Li, Ying Zhu, Brad Reid, Weihong Wang, Selwyn Yuen and Eric Chung. Find out more information at www.planet-lab.org.
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