The New Net: Intel and HP to Commercialize PlanetLab Initiative

"To be honest, the Net today is still pretty primitive. We're still in the stone age when it comes to serious networking, " said Vint Cerf, Chief Scientist at MCI, speaking at the Intel Developer's Forum in San Francisco. "There's a great deal more to done," he said, especially in terms of network architecture. To begin with, the Internet will need to scale to accommodate the other 5 billion people on the planet not yet connected. There will also be a far greater number of network-enabled devices and a whole new set of applications (entertainment, health care, financial, etc) putting additional demands on the network. Cerf contends that new capacity problems will soon emerge in terms of bandwidth and IPv4 address space. He warned of localized packet traffic jams as "flash" congestion occurs when too many users/devices converge.



In order to build the "New Net", the industry needs to create an overlay to current infrastructure, said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's CTO. This new "advanced services overlay" is needed, he said, to address capacity, reliability, security, accessibility, and regional regulatory requirements that limit the usefulness of the current Internet. Certainly, IPv6 provides some of the solution to these problems, said Gelsinger, but "it could take years" before the transition is complete.



Intel envisions a global overlay network based on work underway at the PlanetLab initiative. Over 440 nodes (including major carriers, corporations, Internet2 organizations and 150 universities) are currently operational on the PlanetLab network. PlanetLab uses a distributed set of "Services Virtual Machines" to share infrastructure services and end-user services across the global network. Applications run on PlanetLab are decentralized, with pieces running on many machines spread across the global Internet. They can also 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.



"These new smart services could allow the Internet to detect and warn of worm attacks on its own, dynamically re-route network traffic to avoid delays and improve video web casting," Gelsinger said.



Gelsinger announced that HP is joining with Intel to commercialize PlanetLab services. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is working with HP to use PlanetLab for the distribution of HD video content to its member stations. Intel and HP are encouraging further industry participation in PlanetLab. http://www.planet-lab.org