Intel to help establish PlanetLab in India

Mumbai: Intel India today announced that it is working with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT — B) and Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (IIT — R) to establish the first PlanetLab test bed in India. PlanetLab is a globally distributed test bed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services.

The PlanetLab test bed will be used to implement and test the performance of various protocols for networking and distributed computing and to develop location independent information systems. Intel and the research institutes will investigate the performance of the protocols that provide different levels of consistency ranging from strong to weak.

"PlanetLab is an excellent example of the new open, collaborative research model that allows academic and industry researchers to work together to architect new emerging technologies," says Frank Spindler, vice president, corporate technology group, Intel Corporation.

He explains, "PlanetLab creates a virtual laboratory that researchers around the world can use to develop novel internet services, while at the same time exploring how to evolve the internet to better support continued innovation. With today's announcement, India will play a role in developing a new class of services and applications that are distributed over much of the Web and will affect the design of intelligent servers, network storage and network processors."

Researchers from IIT — R, IIIT — B and Intel India will work together to define and deploy new services in PlanetLab. Intel expects a majority of implementation and evaluation to take place in India on nodes participating in PlanetLab and that many services will eventually migrate into the global PlanetLab infrastructure.

Researchers will regularly report their progress to other PlanetLab participants, in the form of written reports, presentations at PlanetLab meetings, and visits to Intel research sites in India and abroad. PlanetLab participants from India and abroad will regularly communicate amongst themselves as a community in order to provide guidance, facilitate resource allocation and assist with the solving of other technical and non-technical problems.

According to Prof. Sadagopan, Director of IIIT-Bangalore,. IIIT-B has long term research interests in several areas of computing & communications. "Our USP is to look at cutting edge technology use in an innovative manner. Planet Labs fits our vision admirably well."

Prof Srinath Srinivasa of IIIT — B explains the evolution of internet services as the next generation of services where software applications can be built with embedded services that are available over the internet, much the same way that documents embed hyperlinks to other documents. This changes the paradigm of marketing software products and helps in making software products cost effective and less prone to piracy. The PLAN project at IIIT-B under the PlanetLab initiative, addresses a crucial issue towards this end: coordination. Whenever services are composed together to form applications, coordination becomes a very tricky issue. The job of coordination entails maintaining the system's 'dynamic integrity' in the face of multiple service instances running simultaneously. As an analogy, consider a road network that provides 'services' to automobiles. In doing so, the road network should establish and impose a set of traffic rules to maintain the overall system integrity. PLAN is a framework that enables one to define and impose such coordination constraints,.

About PlanetLab
Planet Lab is an open, globally distributed test bed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. There are currently 370 + machines at 156 sites worldwide available to support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton and the University of Washington have used Planet Lab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.

Planet Lab creates a unique environment in which to conduct experiments at Internet Scale. The most obvious is that network services deployed on Planet Lab 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 Planet Lab 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.