Project directory

F-Lab

Federating computing resources.

As proposed by various initiatives in Europe and beyond, an open, sustainable, multi-purpose, and widely shared experimental infrastructure will stimulate the emergence of the Internet of the Future.

There is a growing demand from researchers and production system architects to unite the resources of experimental platforms, which come from multiple independent organizations, into one group. This integrated and ubiquitous platform will provide users with standard interfaces to access the diverse and widely distributed resource collection they need.

The F-Lab project takes advantage of a leading prototype for such an infrastructure: the federation of OneLab experimentation platforms. OneLab paved the way for the concept of federated platforms, bringing a proven federation model through a sustainable interconnection between its flagship platform PlanetLab Europe (PLE) and global infrastructure PlanetLab, with more than five hundred sites around the world.

A key objective of F-Lab is to further develop a common understanding of what it means for independent organizations operating heterogeneous platforms to federate their means of computing, memory and their network resources; This includes defining relevant terminologies, establishing universal design principles, and identifying possible federation strategies.

From an operational point of view, F-Lab will enhance OneLab with contributions from the unique sensor network experiment platform from the SensLAB project and LTE-based cellular systems.

By doing so, and by playing a major role in the federation of experimental platforms at national and international level, F-Lab will continue the development of the federation concept and the expansion of OneLab’s abilities through the federation with a group. pre-established heterogeneous experimentation platforms, each with strong international visibility and high added value from the user’s point of view. F-Lab will also develop the tools to conduct end-to-end experiences through the use of SensLAB’s enhanced OneLab infrastructure.

According to the definition of the ANR, F-Lab is a project of the “Platform” type. It already involves a large community of researchers and very active users; it is open and its operation is durable. F-Lab also participates in structuring the community with strong connections at the international level and develops the best common uses in the operation, management and experiments of experimental platform.

This project is fully aligned with the ANR VERSO call for proposals in the field of the Internet of the Future, sensor networks, federation of networks and experimental platforms. F-Lab is a unique opportunity for the French community to play a major role in the creation of federation systems, a subject of growing interest, as well as for the SensLAB platform to achieve visibility and international use.