Russ Smith
09-23-2003, 07:16 PM
When the Internet was first created in the 1970s, no one could conceive of it's massive growth in the 1980s due to its use by individuals instead of just institutions. Since the infra-structure was built for small-scale, collegial interactions, uses like peer-to-peer-file sharing, streaming video, and e-commerce tax the system far more than anticipated.
Enter PlanetLab, the brain-child of a consortium of IT companies, including Intel, HP, and Google, and over 100 leading computer scientists. The goal of PlanetLab is to provide the infra-structure to support current and anticipated uses of the Internet for the foreseeable future. Despite PlanetLab's scope, the consortium has slated the important advances to be available in the next three years. Those advances include:
* the ability to recreate your personal work-space, including program and data files, anywhere that has an Internet connection.
* the ability to perform data-intensive operations, like streaming video, without taxing the performance of others sharing the same connection.
* the ability to store massive amounts of data in secure, Internet-based stores again, available anywhere there's an Internet connection.
* built-in, network-based detection and elimination of spurious data-streams (malformed headers, invalidly addressed packets) preventing viruses and worms from being launched anonymously.
It should be noted that, for the first three to succeed, users will have to be willing to part with local data. Instead, these advances rely on using "thin-clients" to access data stored in Internet-based resources. The last advancement may cause some qualms in privacy-concerned users. Users would trade easy anonymity for ease of tracking down virus and worm creators.
Enter PlanetLab, the brain-child of a consortium of IT companies, including Intel, HP, and Google, and over 100 leading computer scientists. The goal of PlanetLab is to provide the infra-structure to support current and anticipated uses of the Internet for the foreseeable future. Despite PlanetLab's scope, the consortium has slated the important advances to be available in the next three years. Those advances include:
* the ability to recreate your personal work-space, including program and data files, anywhere that has an Internet connection.
* the ability to perform data-intensive operations, like streaming video, without taxing the performance of others sharing the same connection.
* the ability to store massive amounts of data in secure, Internet-based stores again, available anywhere there's an Internet connection.
* built-in, network-based detection and elimination of spurious data-streams (malformed headers, invalidly addressed packets) preventing viruses and worms from being launched anonymously.
It should be noted that, for the first three to succeed, users will have to be willing to part with local data. Instead, these advances rely on using "thin-clients" to access data stored in Internet-based resources. The last advancement may cause some qualms in privacy-concerned users. Users would trade easy anonymity for ease of tracking down virus and worm creators.