A group of nearly 100 prominent computer scientists are working to supplant the Internet, building a faster, more secure and much more intelligent network called PlanetLab:

When the Internet’s main components were conceived in the 1970s, no one had an inkling of how enormous its impact would be. Now, 30 years later, more than 600 million people worldwide go online to e-mail, search the Web, converse with friends, download music files, and purchase books and gifts. In fact, this year alone, an estimated $3.9 trillion in business transactions will be conducted over the Internet.

The Internet, however, is starting to show its age. Its decades-old infrastructure is composed of basic machines called routers, which are dumb and rigid, leaving the network vulnerable to virus attacks and bottlenecks. Enter: PlanetLab, a possible replacement for the 30-year-old system. A grass-roots group of nearly 100 top computer scientists, with support from industrial giants, is developing this new, faster, much more intelligent and secure network. And the implications of their work are enormous.

Researchers say that their project will help rejuvenate the Internet within the next three years and then eventually replace it. Ultimately, PlanetLab will allow individuals to instantly reconstruct their entire private computer workspaces—down to each program and document—on any Internet terminal. Additionally, PlanetLab will ward off Internet worms and viruses—which cost an average of $81,000 in repair per company per incident last year—as the network itself will be able to spot and stump harmful data packets before they can reach your office or home. Moreover, PlanetLab will allow users to instantly download video and other high-bandwidth data, no matter how many other people are retrieving the same thing. Furthermore, this new network will let users archive data—including tax returns, digital pictures, personal videos and all other data across the Internet itself—safely and durably for decades, eliminating the need for hard disks and recordable CDs.

In short, PlanetLab promises to revolutionize home computing, e-commerce, and IT practices in all corporations. Since integrating these anticipated PlanetLab innovations into the current Internet would be too problematic, the researchers—who come from Princeton, MIT, the University of California, Berkeley and over 50 other institutions—are constructing their network on top of the Internet. Their new machines—called smart nodes—are expected to dramatically boost the Internet’s processing power and data storage capability—an idea that has been embraced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Google.

Since its March 2002 start date, PlanetLab has connected 175 smart nodes at 79 sites in 13 countries and aims to link 1,000 nodes by 2006. The effort is the latest and most promising of several major research endeavors seeking to overcome the Internet’s limitations. “The Internet has reached a plateau in terms of what it can do,” says Larry Peterson, a Princeton computer scientist and the project’s head. “The right thing to do is to start over at another level. That’s the idea behind PlanetLab.”

PlanetLab was inspired by a simple concept—why not transfer data and computation from desktop computers and individual mainframes into the network itself?—an idea that’s far from new and supported most prominently by Sun Microsystems. While today’s Internet would not be able to handle this—its routers are only good at breaking electronic files into separately addressed packets and sending them to other machines—PlanetLab’s smart nodes are standard PCs that can support custom software uploaded by users. Many nodes around the world can run copies of the same program at the same time. Each is plugged directly into a conventional router, so it can share data with other nodes over the current Internet. (This is the reason why PlanetLab is described as an “overlay” network). To accommodate all this, each node runs software that distributes the machine’s resources—including hard-drive space and processing power—among PlanetLab’s many users.

PlanetLab could help surmount the Internet’s biggest weakness—its assumption of trust. Utilized mainly by a few hundred government and university researchers in its early days, the Internet was designed for users who presumably knew each other. Thus, it forwards packets indiscriminately and leaves itself susceptible to worms, viruses and accidental errors, which could end up bogging down or disrupting the entire network. In contrast, PlanetLab’s smart routers could run a program that could stop rogue packets, determine their point of origin and help administrators map—and perhaps prevent—a network-wide contagion. One such program is Netbait, a PlanetLab project developed by researchers at Intel and UC Berkeley. With Netbait, “we can detect patterns and warn the local system administrators that certain machines are infected at their site,” says Peterson. “That’s something that people hadn’t thought about before.”

Indeed, PlanetLab will be giving people a whole new set of things to ponder, with its potential to revitalize and eventually replace today’s creaky Internet with a much faster and smarter network capable of intercepting worms and viruses, alleviating bottlenecks automatically, conveying content instantly, and making personal computing environments accessible from any terminal on the planet. Also interesting to watch will be the ideas that will take off to become the Google or eBay of the new Internet. “We don’t know where that next big idea is going to come from,” says Peterson. “Our goal is just to provide the playing field.”

Source: The Internet Reborn
Wade Roush
Technology Review, Oct. 2003
www.technologyreview.com/articles/roush1003.asp