PlanetLab is a new consortium that will become a "global test bed" for advanced applications on the Internet, the partners said. PlanetLab is designed to spark a new era of innovation by developing "overlay" networks, "persistent memory" and other technologies to upgrade and expand the Internet's capabilities.

The concept was born when Intel gathered a group of researchers to discuss the implications of a new, emerging class of technologies for the Internet. PlanetLab is also led by HP, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, the University of Washington and more than 60 other universities.

PlanetLab consists of 170 computers distributed at 60 research centers around the world. The goal of the project is to grow to more than 1,000 computers in the next few years. These sites connect large client populations to PlanetLab.

The loosely-organized consortium "creates a virtual laboratory that researchers around the world can use to develop novel Internet services, while at the same time exploring how to evolve the Internet to better support continued innovation," David Culler, co-director of Intel Research Berkeley and professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, said in a statement.

"This is just the beginning of a new class of services and applications that are distributed over much of the Web and will affect the design of intelligent servers, network storage and network processors," he said.

PlanetLab has several lofty goals, including creating the means to develop new ways of protecting the Internet from viruses and worms. It also hopes to enable new capabilities, such as persistent storage, or the concept of giving the Internet a "memory."

Another application is "overlay" networks, which have emerged as a way of adding new capabilities to the Internet. These "overlay" networks incorporate the Internet for packet forwarding, but integrate their own intelligent routers and servers on top of the Internet to enable new capabilities. One example of an overlay network enabling a new kind of Internet application is robust video multicasting.

The initial PlanetLab core architecture was designed by: Larry Peterson, Princeton University; Tom Anderson, University of Washington; Timothy Roscoe, Intel; and Culler.