CESNET has become a PlanetLab Consortium member

CESNET has become a member of the PlanetLab international consortium, running the first global virtual network laboratory aiming at implementing quality and structural changes in the Internet. PlanetLab deals with the applications that should respond to the main Internet problems and challenges.

PlanetLab was established in 2002 as a consortium of three American universities – the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and the University of Washington. Other international organizations as well as important research groups of IT companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel and France Telecom, joined the consortium shortly after its foundation. The consortium also includes organizations that ensure the operation of the Internet within academic communities, such as Internet2 (US), Canarie (Canada), and Cernet (China). Members also include national laboratories with extensive research missions in networking, such as INRIA (France). The unique network of the PlanetLab Consortium, with 694 nodes distributed in all areas of our planet, plays a leading role in networking testing and experiments with different applications. Thanks to CESNET's activities in networking research the first two nodes were built and connected into this network. It enables use of this facility by experts and professionals from the Czech Republic for future networking research of global dimensions.

The biggest advantage of PlanetLab is its capability to enable users to create independent applications that can run concurrently throughout the entire network, creating homogeneous virtual network layers. In spite of using modern virtual design for sharing nodes, the individual layers do not affect one another in any way. The programmers and users of applications may therefore create their own structures in the network to be used as a pilot or models for the future Internet. Such applications and structures often comprise hundreds of PlanetLab nodes. To identify objects and nodes in these structures, the users utilize their own addressing methods as well as techniques for data searching and routing of information flows between these objects and nodes mostly based on principles of DHT (Distributed Hash Tables).

One of PlanetLab's most important projects is the OceanStore project, preparing a model for creation of a "global store", making it possible for users to stop worrying about where their data are located. It should react to expansion of the Internet, when it will be used by hundreds of millions of people and each of them will own several millions of bytes of data that they will want to access from any part of the world. The Coral distribution system is designed to allow the efficient distribution of data belonging to users with slow network access, who want to efficiently distribute information published on their servers to a wide range of users all over the world. The CoDNS service ensures a distributed DNS in the network, which is more resistant to attacks and server unreliability. Other services developed by PlanetLab utilize the distributed network for the simultaneous transmission of large data volumes. The Resilient Overlay Network (RON) project focuses on the creation and optimization of routing tables, taking advantage of redundancy and internal monitoring of the routes available in the network.

Many of these services, applications and experiments are directly linked to the research projects that are supported by the American National Science Foundation (NSF). Many projects implemented in PlanetLab are supported or implemented with the direct participation of the IT industry (Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Intel, etc.). For example Wikipedia, the leading free encyclopedia organization, is testing the options for the efficient distribution of large data volumes to the widest user community using multi-degree replications. The famous Google Corporation initiated a project within PlanetLab, evaluating the accessibility of its servers from various parts of the world.

Planetlab is rapidly growing. Any academic organization that inserts its nodes in PlanetLab may become a member of this consortium. CESNET was first but we expect that other partners (the leading Czech universities) will follow this path soon. The activities of CESNET in PlanetLab will relate to other CESNET projects that are under preparation for the near future. This activity will be a part of the global network activities which are currently under preparation in many countries. One example is the European project Next Generation of Internet (NGI), or the American initiative titled GENI, organized by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

From the first moment that CESNET links its computers into this network they will be used and shared by the entire community of PlanetLab. After several days, the traffic from 38 partner organizations, working on projects with a worldwide scope, has been registered on these machines. For users from the Czech Technical University of Prague and universities in Brno (Masaryk University and the Technical University), the system will be accessible from the upcoming semester. It will be up to them whether they manage to specify suitable scientific projects, fitting the context of the entire PlanetLab project.

The CESNET association was founded by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The association is currently financed mainly from the resources of the governmental Committee for Research and Education and the resources of the members of the association. The association conducts research and development in the area of information and communication technologies, and building and developing the national gigabit optical network – CESNET2 – designed for research and educational purposes. Due to the research activities and results achieved, the CESNET association acts as a representative of the Czech Republic in the project within which a pan-European network called GEANT2 is constructed, actively taking part in the implementation of this project as well. Among other projects, the association participates in the development of a global lambda infrastructure titled GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), to which the Czech experimental network CzechLight is connected.