Colloquium Details
PlanetLab: Wiring the Earth as a Network Testbed
| Author: | Mic Bowman Intel Research |
|---|---|
| Date: | December 09, 2003 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Abstract
PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed testbed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. There are currently more than 180 machines at 85 sites world-wide available to support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 150 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. Many of the results from these experiments are now appearing in such internationally prestigious conferences as ACMs SOSP, SIGCOMM and OSDI. 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.
Biography
Mic Bowman received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. Bowman joined Intel's Personal Information Management group in 1999. While at Intel, he has developed personal information retrieval applications, context-based communication systems, and middleware services for mobile applications. He is also a Principal Investigator for Intel's Planetary Services Strategic Research Project. Prior to joining Intel, Bowman worked at Transarc Corporation, where he led research teams that developed distributed search services for the Web, distributed file systems, and naming systems.