Volume 3, Issue 6 August 2003

2003
2002
2001

Thinking Locally, Experimenting Globally by David Pescovitz Printer-friendly version Berkeley computer science professor David Culler is the director of the Intel Research Berkeley Laboratory and is also a principal investigator on the PlanetLab project. Peg Skorpinski photo Imagine you've arrived in Paris for a conference and you sit down at an Internet station in the hotel lobby. You're thousands of miles from your office in Berkeley, California, but your familiar computer desktop instantly bursts onto the screen. Any data you need is fetched instantly and your most processor-hungry applications run without a hitch. No fuss, no muss, and most impressively, no lag. Somehow, all of your data and computing power has followed you across the world. This next-generation Internet application is just one of the geographically-distributed online services currently in development on PlanetLab, a global online test bed developed by UC Berkeley, Intel Research, Hewlett Packard, and other university collaborators around the world. First conceived of by Berkeley computer science professor David Culler, the director of the Intel Research Berkeley Laboratory, and Princeton University professor Larry Peterson, PlanetLab is now running on 170 computers at 60 research centers around the world. In the next few years, Culler expects the network to grow to more than 1,000 computers installed in a diverse array of academic institutions, corporations, Internet service providers and homes. Unlike most of today's Internet services and applications that are based at one Web site, PlanetLab enables pieces of new applications to run on many computers around the world, self-organizing to form their own networks and enabling processing to occur inside the network instead of at its edges. "Increasingly important services are going to be implemented as capability spreads over much of the Internet instead of being concentrated at a few points," says Culler, whose work is part of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). How do you think networking research like PlanetLab can best serve the technology demands placed on today's society? We want to hear from you... For example, an overlay network like PlanetLab could lead to more robust video multicasting. Today, a Web site hosting a popular video clip can become overloaded with too many requests from viewers. An overlay network could automatically redirect requests for the video to sites hosting the same content that are nearer to the viewer, eliminating traffic jams and increasing download speeds for the user. PlanetLab may also lead to new methods to protect the Internet from viruses and worms and the development of "persistent" storage capabilities that give the Internet a "memory." This kind of online "storage utility" is the aim of OceanStore, one of the UC Berkeley projects experimentally deployed on PlanetLab. Led by computer science professor John Kubiatowicz, OceanStore is essentially a massively-distributed hard drive system. The system copies and spreads a user's data to servers around the world for safekeeping and quick access. "One of the motivations for developing PlanetLab was that there were leading researchers at Berkeley who had a clear direction in their projects, such as OceanStore, but no test-bed for trying it out," Culler says. David Culler's Home Page PlanetLab "Diving Into An Ocean of Storage" (Lab Notes, December 2002) Intel Research Berkeley Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow. Media contact: Teresa Moore, Lab Notes editor, Director of Public Affairs Writer, Researcher: David Pescovitz Web Manager: Michele Foley Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu. © 2003 UC Regents. Updated 7/30/03.