Intel, H-P Help Academia Set Up Web Test Network

More than 60 universities, aided by Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., have set up a special computer network to test kinds of Internet services that could be deployed on a global scale.

By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The project, called Planet Lab, has 170 computers deployed at research centers world-wide. The machines are expected to communicate using the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, but distribute computing chores in ways that allow them to act like a separate, unified network.

Such "overlay" networks are used by private companies for such purposes as minimizing data congestion when broadcasting video and audio over the Internet. But few researchers have access to such costly facilities, prompting the idea of setting up Planet Lab to help them test their ideas for network applications, said Larry Peterson, a computer-science professor at Princeton University who is helping to run the project.

Intel, a Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker, donated 100 computers to help start the effort. H-P, Palo Alto, Calif., is contributing an additional 30 that have been installed at 10 sites. During the next phase of the project, participants plan to set up a consortium that will operate the network and to invite other companies and education institutions to participate.

The problem with the Internet is that it is an opaque notion to many users, composed of myriad Web servers, routing facilities and transmission lines that have different performance characteristics and are subject to interruptions and delays. "It’s difficult for applications to observe those conditions and adapt to them," said David Culler, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who has been on leave to work at an Intel-funded lab.

Overlay networks distribute software in Web sites and server rooms around the Internet to monitor and manage events better. An experimental project called Netbait, running on Planet Lab’s facilities, is watching the Internet for the spread of destructive programs such as viruses and worms. By matching the distinctive digital characteristics of each dangerous program with messages being sent from various locations, machines that have been infected with the code can be isolated from infecting others, organizers of the Netbait experiment say.

Other promising areas for research on Planet Lab include ways to archive data safely in multiple repositories around the world, schemes to help a user’s personal information electronically travel with them as they move to various locations, distributed Internet-based games and mathematical formulas to broadcast video information more efficiently, Mr. Peterson said.

Write to Don Clark at [email protected]

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