"People are looking at distributed search engines. Distributed storage is particularly interesting as you start to integrate that with various kinds of sensors streaming information from the physical world," he said.
Enhancing massively multiplayer games is another potential application but, said Culler, "We believe the most important ones are the ones we haven't seen yet because people haven't had the tools available."
Those tools are starting to come online. Peterson expects the network will almost double in size to 300 nodes by the end of this year, and hopes for 1,000 nodes within two years.
Intel Research has already donated around 100 servers to the project, Culler said. HP is donating 30, according to Rick McGeer of HP Labs. McGeer is HP's liaison officer with CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at Berkeley.
The servers PlanetLab uses are based on Intel's Pentium III processor, and run a customized version of Red Hat's version of the Linux operating system, Peterson said. "It's convenient to get things running quickly, and a lot of the research community uses Linux," Peterson said.
There are still holes in PlanetLab's net, though. "We don't have nodes in Japan. We are very interested in seeing sites come up there," Culler said.
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