PlanetLab was a group of computers available as a

testbed A testbed (also spelled test bed) is a platform for conducting rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computational tools, and new technologies. The term is used across many disciplines to describe experimental rese ...

for

computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

and

distributed systems A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

research. It was established in 2002 by Prof.

Larry L. Peterson Larry L. Peterson is an American computer scientist, known primarily as the Director of the PlanetLab Consortium, co-author (with Bruce Davie) of the networking textbook "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach," and for his research on the TCP Vega ...

and Prof. David Culler, and as of June 2010, it was composed of 1090

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

s at 507 sites worldwide. Each research project had a "slice", or

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

access to a subset of the nodes. Accounts were limited to persons affiliated with corporations and universities that hosted PlanetLab nodes. However, a number of free, public services have been deployed on PlanetLab, including

CoDeeN CoDeeN is a proxy server system created at Princeton University in 2003 and deployed for general use on PlanetLab. It operates as per the following: # Users set their internet caches to a nearby high bandwidth proxy that participates in the syst ...

, the Coral Content Distribution Network, and Open DHT. Open DHT was taken down on 1 July 2009. PlanetLab was officially shut down in May 2020 but continues in Europe.

References

External links

PlanetLab

PlanetLab Europe
Software testing {{Compu-network-stub