On December 26, 2004, a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami that resulted in widespread destruction across 17 countries and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. While news outlets eventually covered the event, much of the earliest footage came from tourists who used digital cameras and camcorders to record what they witnessed.
At that time, sharing large video files online was challenging. There were no platforms like YouTube or Dropbox, and social media sites such as Facebook were still new. Most websites could not handle sudden surges in traffic, which often led to crashes when many people tried to access them simultaneously.
Michael Freedman, now a professor of computer science at Princeton University, recalled: “At the time, most websites were basically just a server running in somebody’s closet.” He explained that even small increases in internet traffic could overwhelm these servers.
In early 2004, Freedman developed a free service allowing users to store website content on globally distributed servers by simply adding “nyud.net” to any URL domain. This approach enabled widespread sharing without overloading individual websites and represented an early version of what is now known as a content delivery network (CDN). The system became particularly valuable during the aftermath of the tsunami when thousands relied on it to distribute videos documenting the disaster.
The technology behind this CDN was built on PlanetLab—a global network of servers managed by research universities and tech companies. PlanetLab was created as an experimental platform for building new computer systems and networks. Larry Peterson, professor emeritus at Princeton University and one of its developers, said: “PlanetLab did not create the cloud, but it anticipated the cloud.”
The concept for PlanetLab emerged from a 2002 meeting organized by Peterson and his colleague David Culler at Intel Research’s Berkeley office. Researchers needed shared infrastructure for large-scale experiments because existing methods—like informally borrowing computing resources from colleagues—were inadequate for scaling up tests across geographically dispersed locations.
David Tennenhouse, former director of research at Intel, emphasized that testing software over long distances is crucial due to issues like latency and round-trip times. He also noted that shared testbeds make it easier for researchers to benchmark progress: “A shared testbed for research substantially lowered the bar for doing these experiments and comparing the results.”
After its inception in March 2002, PlanetLab quickly expanded. By 2005 it had deployed 500 servers worldwide; eventually growing to more than 1,300 servers across nearly 50 countries. Support came from both academia and industry—Intel contributed initial hardware and operational support while Hewlett Packard, Google, and funding agencies like the National Science Foundation played significant roles.
Tennenhouse reflected on maintaining such an expansive system: “People lose track of the miracle of having this thing run continuously. That was an unappreciated triumph. Larry Peterson and the team at Princeton deserve a lot of credit for that.”
Three main technical advances arose from PlanetLab’s development:
First was constructing virtualized systems on hundreds of physical servers around the world so multiple researchers could securely share resources without interfering with each other’s work—a process foundational to today’s cloud computing infrastructure. Peterson remarked: “Virtual machines are the technology at the core of the cloud.”
Second was improved measurement tools for monitoring internet speed and performance globally by collecting data close to end-users rather than centrally—a technique later adopted by projects like Measurement Lab (M-Lab), supported by Google.
Third were numerous services prototyped using PlanetLab—including innovations in peer-to-peer sharing, distributed infrastructure management, file transfers, and location-based services—all essential elements underpinning modern internet applications.
Other universities also built CDNs atop PlanetLab; one co-founded by Peterson with Princeton colleague Vivek Pai was later acquired by a major telecommunications company.
Over its lifespan until its closure in 2020, thousands used PlanetLab for research purposes. According to Peterson: “The researchers that got experience on PlanetLab are the ones that went on to Google and Microsoft and Facebook and so on,” then helped develop today’s commercial cloud infrastructure.
