Network Systems Group Princeton University   Publication Info

Title

Using PlanetLab for Network Research: Myths, Realities, and Best Practices

Authors

Neil Spring
Larry Peterson
Andy Bavier
Vivek S. Pai

Abstract

PlanetLab is a research testbed that supports 428 experiments on 276 sites, with 583 nodes in 30 countries. It has lowered the barrier to distributed experimentation in network measurement, peer-to-peer networks, content distribution, resource management, authentication, distributed file systems, and many other areas. PlanetLab did not become a useful network testbed overnight. It started as little more than a group of Linux machines with a common password file, which scaled poorly and suffered under load. However, PlanetLab was conceived as an evolvable system under the direction of a community of researchers. With their help, PlanetLab version 3.0 has since corrected many previous faults through virtualization and substantial performance isolation. This paper is meant to guide those considering developing a network service or experiment on PlanetLab by separating widely-held myths from the realities of service and experiment deployment.

Published
As

In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Real, Large, Distributed Systems (WORLDS '05)
San Francisco, CA, December 2005

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