Planet-Lab … planetary-scale applications platform
While looking around at some interesting monitoring software (Ganglia link below) I came across an Intel Research sponsored project that I hadn’t seen before … PlanetLab. The home page of their web site states:

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. PlanetLab nodes support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.

This is a very impressive project, and I downloaded a lot of their documentation and courseware to read through. I can only imagine what is going to occur as we all contribute our computers into communities of machines like this!

The link below is the distributed monitoring system that I was checking out …

Ganglia 2.5.6 (Monitoring core). A scalable distributed monitoring system. [freshmeat.net]