Operating System Support for Planetary-Scale Network Services

PlanetLab is a geographically distributed overlay network designed to support the evaluation and deployment of planetary-scale network services. Two high-level goals shape its design. First, to enable a large research community to share the infrastructure, PlanetLab provides distributed virtualization, whereby each service runs in an isolated slice of PlanetLab’s global resources. Second, to support competition among multiple network services, PlanetLab decouples the operating system running on each node from the network-wide services that define PlanetLab, a principle sometimes referred to as unbundled management. This paper describes how PlanetLab realizes the goals of distributed virtualization and unbundled management, with a focus on the OS running on each node.