This project is supporting and extending the PlanetLab research testbed. PlanetLab is a 1000-node overlay network spanning 500 sites and 40+ countries world-wide. It is used to evaluate new network services (e.g., peer-to-peer networks, content distribution, scalable object location services, and adaptive routing overlays), as well as to observe Internet activity (e.g., network topology, routing dynamics, path latency and bandwidth, and failures properties). In supporting PlanetLab, this project is focused on enabling the research community to add diversity and scale to the set of available computing and communication resources. The project is also extending PlanetLab with improved instrumentation. Our approach is to leverage the data collection and analysis facilities currently used to operate PlanetLab to provide more value to PlanetLab users. There are two aspects to this. First, the project is making the raw data collected by all tools available for public download. Of course data can have multiple uses, and it seems likely that the same data used for operations may be of research value to the community. Second, the project is extending the instrumentation and related toolset to help users answer the kinds of questions they face when developing a widely distributed network service: "Is there something wrong with my service? If so, what is the cause, and how do I fix it?'' Having already made the investment to build a set of efficient data collection facilities and powerful analysis tools, the goal of the project is to see them solve as many problems as possible.
