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Summary: Learning from PlanetLab
Thomas Anderson
University of Washington
Timothy Roscoe
Intel Research Berkeley
Abstract
PlanetLab has been an enormously successful testbed for
networking and distributed systems research, and it is likely
to have a significant influence on future systems. In this pa-
per, we examine PlanetLab's success, and caution against
an uncritical acceptance of the factors that led to it. We
discuss nine design decisions that were essential to Planet-
Lab's initial success and yet in our view should be revisited
in order to better position PlanetLab for its future growth.
Introduction
PlanetLab was designed and constructed as a global plat-
form for supporting distributed systems and network re-
search [23]. Although not the first project to attempt
this (earlier examples include CAIRN [13], Active Net-
works [31, 28], the MBone [15], NIMI [21], Access [29],
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