Distributing Akaroa2 on PlanetLab

PlanetLab is an overlay-based test-bed that serves as a research and deployment platform for academic institutions and industrial research labs around the world. Created in 2002 at Princeton University, PlanetLab has expanded to nearly 1000 machines worldwide. The University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand installed two such nodes at the end of 2002. As an initial phase to a broader deployment goal, we successfully distributed Akaroa2 on the machines at the Canterbury, NZ site of PlanetLab in October 2008. Akaroa2 is the latest version of a fully automated simulation controller, originally designed for running distributed stochastic simulations in a local area network environment. It was designed within the AKAROA project at UC by the Simulation Research Group. In this paper we describe our experience with PlanetLab, the methods we have practiced for the distribution of Akaroa2 over PlanetLab and associated issues. 1