What is EdgeNET / PlanetLab Europe?
EdgeNET / PlanetLab Europe is the European arm of the global PlanetLab system, the world’s largest research networking facility, which gives experimenters access to Internet-connected Linux virtual machines on over 1000 networked servers located in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Researchers use PLE for experiments on overlays, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, content distribution networks, network security, and network measurements, among many other topics.
Organisations can join PLE if they provide two physical servers at their premises, which are directly connected to the internet (no firewalls) and are put under the control of the PLE management software. Once you are a member of PLE, you can request virtual machines on any of the PLE physical servers. These virtual machines will always be directly connected to the public Internet. As an experimenter, you have full control over these virtual machines. The PlanetLab Europe Consortium has over 140 signed member institutions: mostly universities and industrial research laboratories, each of which hosts two servers that it makes available to the global system. These institutions are home to 937 experimenters. On a typical recent day, 244 were connected to ongoing experiments.
Through Fed4FIRE, experimenters affiliated with organisations that have not joined PlanetLab Europe will now also be able to perform experiments on the PLE (European) arm of the global PlanetLab system. Access through Fed4FIRE to the other PlanetLab instances in the United States, Asia and elsewhere is not yet foreseen.
Overview
Geographical distribution
The nodes belonging to PLE are part of institutions spread over Europe. Furthermore, through specific PlanetLab federations between PLE, PlanetLab Central and the Japanese PlanetLab instance, PLE experimenters can in fact deploy their virtual machines on servers anywhere across the world.
Geographical distribution of EdgeNET
EdgeNET / PlanetLab Europe properties
Compared to the summary figure presented before, the situation at the EdgeNET testbed is characterized by the following properties:
- Zabbix is not used. Nagios is used for infrastructure monitoring, collected is used for facility monitoring
- The depicted resources are PLE specific: 2 physical servers per site on which experimenters can create virtual machines belonging to their slice. These are connected directly to the public internet, without any firewalling or NAT.
EdgeNET properties
Contact
Email: admin@edge-net.org
More details can be found at: http://www.planet-lab.eu
