Net protocol research test bed opened at IIIT-B

The Indian Institute of Information Technology - Bangalore (IIIT-B), in association with Intel India, has opened PlanetLab at its campus, which is a global test bed for developing and deploying for next generation Internet protocols, applications and services.

PlanetLab was started a couple of years ago by researchers and academicians at Princeton, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

It has over 350 machines at 156 sites worldwide. So far over 200 research projects on diverse topics such as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables and distributed query processing have been successfully conducted here.

According to Frank Spindler, vice-president (corporate technology group), Intel, "PlanetLab is an excellent example of the new open, collaborative research model that allows academic and industry researchers to work together to architecture new emerging technologies."

The country's second PlanetLab will be set up at IIT - Roorkee (IIT-R) and is expected to be functional next month. According to Intel India president Ketan Sampat, Intel would also help in setting up PlanetLab at IIT-R.

According to Spindler, PlanetLab creates a virtual laboratory that researchers around the world can use to develop novel Internet services.

At the same time, the researchers can explore to evolve the Internet.

"India will play a role in developing a new class of services and applications that are distributed over the Web and will affect the design of intelligent servers, network storage and network processors," Spindler said.