PlanetLab is now in its third phase. It was founded in 2002 in the United States and grew into the most widely used testbed for computer networking and distributed systems research (see PlanetLab History). In 2007, a European instance was launched and the two operated as a federated system, giving researchers access to nodes around the world. In 2020, the US instance closed, leaving the European instance, now called PlanetLab V3, to carry on independently.

PlanetLab is also in its third software iteration. Initially built on Linux-VServer, it switched to LXC under the EU-US partnership. The idea for the latest switch originated with Rick McGeer and Andy Bavier, who recognized the potential of Kubernetes as the de facto standard for orchestrating container deployments. A prototype was developed with funding from a US National Science Foundation EAGER grant. This was rearchitected by Berat Senel as the EdgeNet extensions in his doctoral work at Sorbonne University, funded by VMware and the European Commission’s NGI Atlantic project.

PlanetLab is led by Timur Friedman and Olivier Fourmaux at the LIP6 computer science laboratory of Sorbonne University, under the governance of the PlanetLab Europe consortium led by Sorbonne University. It received early-stage funding in the lead-up to the creation of SLICES-FR, the French part of the EU’s SLICES-RI research infrastructure, and is currently in discussions to formally join SLICES-FR. In the meantime, PlanetLab welcomes all SLICES users. PlanetLab receives cybersecurity funding from the French Ministry of Armed Forces.