F-Lab: Federating computing resources – F-Lab

As proposed by initiatives in Europe and worldwide, enabling an open, general-purpose, and sustainable large-scale shared experimental facility will foster the emergence of the Future Internet. There is an increasing demand among researchers and production system architects to federate testbed resources from multiple autonomous organizations into a seamless/ubiquitous resource pool, thereby giving users standard interfaces for accessing the widely distributed and diverse collection of resources they need to conduct their experiments.

The F-Lab project builds on a leading prototype for such a facility: the OneLab federation of testbeds. OneLab pioneered the concept of testbed federation, providing a federation model that has been proven through a durable interconnection between its flagship testbed PlanetLab Europe (PLE) and the global PlanetLab infrastructure, mutualising over five hundred sites around the world. One key objective of F-Lab is to further develop an understanding of what it means for autonomous organizations operating heterogeneous testbeds to federate their computation, storage and network resources, including defining terminology, establishing universal design principles, and identifying candidate federation strategies.

On the operational side, F-Lab will enhance OneLab with the contribution of the unique sensor network testbeds from SensLAB, and LTE based cellular systems. In doing so, F-Lab continues the expansion of OneLab’s capabilities through federation with an established set of heterogeneous testbeds with high international visibility and value for users, developing the federation concept in the process, and playing a major role in the federation of national and international testbeds. F-Lab will also develop tools to conduct end-to-end experiments using the OneLab facility enriched with SensLAB and LTE.

F-Lab is a “platform” type of project, fully compliant with the ANR VERSO call’s definition of a platform (technically challenging, open, shared and sustainable). It already involves a large and vibrant community of researchers and users; it is open and its operation is sustainable. It helps to structure the community with strong connections at the international level and develops common best practices in testbed operation, management, and experiments. It is fully aligned with the call in the areas of Future Internet, sensor and cellular networks, federation of networks and testbeds.
F-Lab is a unique opportunity for the French community to play a stronger role in the design of federation systems, a topic of growing interest; for the SensLAB testbed to reach an international visibility and use; and for pioneering testbeds on LTE technology.