Internet Emulator

John3 writes "InternetNewsM is reporting that PlanetLab is getting closer to reality. According to this article, a consortium of universities (including Princeton) is launching a test-bed platform based on Red Hat Linux. This project is different than Internet2 or some of the other "alternate Internet" networks being developed, and seems to offer the most benefit to distributed computing projects rather than generic WAN/Internet communications."

Re:Is it just me...

[frieked]

You're right to say that the blurb sounds like a bunch of buzzwords but this actually isn't vaporware...Planet-lab has actually got a lot of big sponsors (Intel, HP...) behind them and while I don't see this being used for the everyday internet user, Planetlab is the kind of thing corporations will find very useful for its distributed computing capabilities. It's still in its infant stages now but this definitely is a project with potential.

Re:Is it just me...

[John3]

It took a few readings of that article as well as a visit to the PlanetLab site for me to get an idea what they are trying to do. In simple terms, it looks like a network designed specifically for distributed computing projects like SETI@Home (as an example of a publicly accessible research project). Instead of relying on the Internet to link up your distributed machines, PlanetLab would be a closed high performance network that would allow the researchers to avoid the usual Internet traffic jams.

At least that's what it sounds like to me.

Re:Is it just me...

[angio]

Article fluffy, planetlab not fluffy. For the moment, planetlab is primarily a research testbed. It has about 160 nodes deployed at 65 sites; these nodes are in use most of the time by a decently large group of researchers conducting internet measurement studies and research into distributed computation.

But - that's only part of the goal. Ultimately, I believe that the goal of Planetlab is to help transition these research technologies into deployed, useful services; so the network becomes more than just a research platform, it becomes the next DNS infrastructure, or the next Akamai, or the next Napster (ok, ok, don't sue!).

So, some of the examples the article cited are pretty illustrative. For example, the MIT Chord [mit.edu] project is a Distributed Hash Table. DHTs are a peer-to-peer storage/retrieval system that allow completely decentralized resource sharing between cooperating hosts. And so on, and so on. The hope of the PlanetLab folk is that some of these projects will become the foundation for the next Internet architecture, or internet middleware, or whatever it is you want to call it -- the next set of critical services that change the way we use the 'net.

But even before that, Planetlab is one heck of a useful research tool. There are several papers at this year's Sigcomm [acm.org] conference (big computer networking conference) that took their measurements using Planetlab. There are a number of other papers and projects in the pipeline that're using planetlab as their research testbed. The cool thing about planetlab is that it's now considerably larger than most prior testbeds, and has a lot more momentum for future growth. Full disclosure: I spend a part of my time working on planetlab, but this post is not any kind of official view, it's just my interpretation.-

Re:Is it just me...

[angio]

Close, but not quite. Planetlab is not a closed, high performance network. Rather, it's more of an overlay testbed: The machines reside on the Internet (companies that host nodes) and on the Internet2 (research universities). That's part of what's so cool about it - the machines reside all over the world (see the map on the planetlab website [planet-lab.org] - it's an accurate reflection of the location of the nodes). They have a lot of visibility into nooks and crannies on the Internet, and they're beginning to be deployed enough that there's often a planetlab node nearby, whereever in the network you are.

Re:Is it just me...

[awtbfb]

Instead of relying on the Internet to link up your distributed machines, PlanetLab would be a closed high performance network that would allow the researchers to avoid the usual Internet traffic jams.

Also known as a private LAN

Re:REQ: Internet ROM

[Jeedo]

actually it's (for the web, not the internet):

wget -rmpH http://directory.google.com

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