PlanetLab History
- March 2002: Larry Peterson (Princeton) and David Culler (UC
Berkeley and Intel Research) organize an "underground" meeting of
researchers interested in planetary-scale network services, and
propose PlanetLab as a community testbed. The meeting, hosted by Intel
Research - Berkeley, draws 30 researchers from MIT, Washington, Rice,
Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, CMU, and Utah. David Tennenhouse
(Intel Research) agrees to seed-fund the project with 100 machines.
- June 2002: Brent Chun and Timothy Roscoe (Intel Research),
Eric Fraser (UC Berkeley), and Mike Wawrzoniak (Princeton) bring up
first PlanetLab nodes at Intel Research - Berkeley, UC Berkeley, and
Princeton. The initial system (dubbed Version 0.5) leverages the
Ganglia monitoring service and the RootStock installation mechanism
from the Millennium cluster project.
- August 2002: Nearly 80 network system researchers meet at CMU
the day before the SIGCOMM '02 conference to learn about PlanetLab and
discuss its general architecture.
- October 2002: Initial deployment of 100 nodes at 42 sites is
complete. Operational support (including www.planet-lab.org) moves to
Intel's Distributed Systems Lab (DSL) in Oregon, under the direction
of Mic Bowman.
- October 2002: Verion 1.0 of the PlanetLab software, with
support for vserver-based virtual machines and safe raw sockets, is
deployed. Version 1.0 is jointly developed by implementation teams at
Intel Research - Berkeley, Intel DSL, and Princeton.
- October 2002: Initial paper describing PlanetLab and its
goals is presented by Peterson, Culler, Roscoe, and Tom Anderson
(Washington) at the HotNets workshop in Princeton.
- December 2002: Network systems researchers meet at MIT the
day after the 5th Symposium on Operating System Design and
Implementation (OSDI) to provide further input into PlanetLab's
design. Several research groups report their early experiences running
wide-area services on PlanetLab.
- February 2003: PlanetLab nodes come on-line at three PoPs of
Internet2's Abilene backbone. All 11 Abilene PoPs host PlanetLab nodes
by the end of 2003.
- June 2003: HP joins PlanetLab, and along with Intel,
Princeton, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington publicly
announce their intent to create a joint academic/industrial Consortium
to oversee the further expansion and development of PlanetLab.
- September 2003: NSF announces a $4.5M award to Princeton, UC
Berkeley, and Washington for the purpose of supporting and enhancing
PlanetLab.
- September 2003: PlanetLab passes the 200 node mark.
- October 2003: Researchers meet at RPI the day before 19th
Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP) to continue their
discussion about PlanetLab's design, and report results of network
services deployed on PlanetLab.
- December 2003: PlanetLab passes the 300 node mark.
- January 2004: Princeton, Berkeley, and Washington formally
create PlanetLab Consortium, with Intel and HP as Charter commercial
members. Princeton hosts the Consortium, with Peterson named as its
Director. Operational responsibility for PlanetLab moves from Intel to
Princeton.
- January 2004: Version 2.0 of the PlanetLab software, with
support for dynamic slices, is deployed.
- February 2004: First PlanetLab nodes come up on CANARIE, the
Canadian research network. CANARIE nodes are donated by Intel.
- April 2004: Researchers meet at HP Labs the day after the 1st
Symposium on Network System Design and Implementation (NSDI) to
continue their discussion about PlanetLab's design, and report results
of network services deployed on PlanetLab. A paper describing PlanetLab's
architecture is presented at NSDI.
- May 2004: European PlanetLab meeting is hosted by Cambridge
University (UK), with representatives from more than 30 European
institutions in attendance. In addition to a survey of research using
PlanetLab throughout Europe, options for hosting a regional support
team in Europe are explored.
- July 2004: PlanetLab passes the 400 node mark.
- August 2004: First PlanetLab nodes come up on the Rede Nacional
de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), the Brazilian National Education and Research
Network. RNP nodes are donated by HP and Intel.
- September 2004: PlanetLab is featured in Intel CTO Pat
Gelsinger's keynote address at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF). Intel
and HP announce plans to explore commercialization opportunities with
respect to PlanetLab.
- September 2004: Asian PlanetLab meeting is hosted by KAIST in
Seoul, South Korea.
- December 2004: CERNET, the Chinese Education and Research Network,
joins PlanetLab. CERNET nodes are donated by Intel and HP.
- December 2004: PlanetLab passes the 500 node mark.
- September 2005: PlanetLab passes the 600 node mark.
- October 2005: EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland hosts a "PlanetLab
Everywhere" meeting. The attendees discuss "private PlanetLabs" and
how to federate them.
- May 2006: HP Labs hosts a PlanetLab meeting focused on
federation. Mark Huang (Princeton) demonstrates MyPLC, a packaging of
the PlanetLab software for the purpose of instantiating private
PlanetLabs.
- September 2006: PlanetLab passes the 700 node mark.
- September 2006: A paper describing VINI, a layer-2 variant
of PlanetLab, is presented at SIGCOMM.
- April 2007: Version 4.0 of the PlanetLab software, based on MyPLC, is deployed.
- June 2007: First ROADS (Real Overlays and Distributed Systems) workshop held in Belem Brazil. Second workshop scheduled for July in Warsaw Poland.
- June 2007: PlanetLab passes the 800 node mark.
- July 2007: PlanetLab federates with the OneLab project, which begins to support "PlanetLab - Europe".
- March 2008: PlanetLab bibliography updated to include over 180 academic papers.
- May 2008: First PlanetLab Developer's Meeting held at Princeton. Attended by participants from the US, Japan, France, Israel, and Sweden.
- October 2008. PlanetLab software, hosting the CoBlitz service, delivers video of the Polish Presidential debates as part of a CDN trial in Orange Poland.
- October 2008: A prototype implementation of the GENI interfaces to PlanetLab functionality is made available.
- November 2008. Policy analysis for PlanetLab is published. Reports on six years of experience responding to MPAA threats, law enforcement inquiries, University CIO requests, and random user complaints.
- January 2009: PlanetLab, Google, and the Open Technology Institute announce a joint effort to launch Measurement-Lab.
- March 2011: FCC announces use of Measurement-Lab in support of US broadband mapping project (broadband.gov).
- September 2011: ViCCI comes on-line with clusters at Princeton, Georgia Tech, Stanford, and the University of Washington.
- June 2012: IPv6 supported on Measurement-Lab.
- June 2012. Peter Willis (BT) describes first proof-of-concept for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) at the Cloud Carrier Summit in Paris. In collaboration with BT, HP, Tail-F, Verivue, and Intel, the PoC includes PlanetLab+CoBlitz CDN as the first demo VNF.
- July 2012: A 5th ViCCI site, at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, comes on-line.
- August 2013. Paper introducing PlanetLab wins ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award.
- October 2013. Open Networking Lab, in collaboration with Internet2, launches a CDN on ViCCI to serve VM images for their open source SDN platforms. The CDN, running under a research license from Akamai, is based on PlanetLab and CoBlitz software.
- March 2014. Open Network Lab demos the use of a Akamai's Licensed CDN at Open Networking Summit, running as a VNF at the network edge.
- April 2014. Paper describing PlanetLab architecture wins Usenix NSDI Test of Time Award.
- June 2014. PlanetLab recognized with Usenix Software Tool Users Group (STUG) Award.
- October 2014. A Measurement-Lab study of ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance sheds light on the dispute between ISPs and Netflix. Articles in the press help interpret the results.
- June 2015. Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) demonstrated at the Open Networking Summit. Includes PlanetLab/ViCCI multi-cloud management software (renamed XOS) running under the covers.
- April 2018. Measurement-Lab, running PlanetLab software on 600 servers world-wide, answers 20,000+ Google queries every day asking: "How fast is my Internet?"
- September 2019. The CDN deployed by the Open Network Lab in 2013, officially decommissioned in January, 2018, was discovered to still be running on two ViCCI nodes and delivering content to users.
- November 2019. Measurement-Lab completes its transition off the PlanetLab platform and onto a Kubernetes-based infrastructure.
- March 2020. Farewell Post.
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