iLab.t
iLab.t is a devops and research team focused on research infrastructure used by researchers around the world.
The iLab.t team has 25+ years of experience in developing, setting up and maintaining research infrastructure for top notch research in the fields of networking, AI and data. The team is also involved in research projects about research infrastructures with world-wide collaborations. Till 2040, the research infrastructure will also be part of the larger European Slices (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies) infrastructure which is on the ESFRI roadmap.
The know-how of the team is used also for specific testbeds, such as a dedicated testbed to test and certify intelligent traffic lights (https://www.mobilidata.be/en/news/simpler-c-its-certification-protecting-road-users-and-your-reputation).
The list of currently available infrastructure:
- Virtual wall (Gent): to perform wired networking, cloud, distributed software, service backends and scalability experiments. 550+ installed servers that can be accessed as bare metal.
- VMLab (Gent): virtual machines that can be set up easily and at large scale, when bare metal servers are not needed
- w-iLab.t (Gent): pseudo shielded environment for wireless and IoT research with over 150 wireless nodes (fixed and mobile), including software defined radios
- Officelab (Gent): a real office environment for wireless and IoT research with over 110 embedded PCs spread over the building.
- GPULab (Gent and Antwerpen): testbed with 125+ GPUs with over 570.000+ cuda cores and 1.8TB+ GPU RAM for AI research and everything which needs GPUs. Available through interactive jupyter notebooks and scheduled jobs.
- CityLab (Antwerpen): testbed for wireless networking experimentation in the unlicensed spectrum in the city of Antwerp. 50 nodes are spread over an area of 1 square km.
- Large data storage (Gent and Antwerpen): with S3 API to support longer term data storage for experimentation with the above infrastructure.
All testbeds are available with the same account and tools. The testbeds are open to externals. All testbeds are accessible through remote access, which is also the main usage of the testbeds.
More information can be found at http://ilabt.imec.be.
Some publications that used the above research infrastructure for performing the research:
- Xianjun, Jiao, Wei, Liu and Michael, Mehari, “open-source IEEE802.11/Wi-Fi baseband chip/FPGA design”, https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi, 2019
- M. Selimi, L. Navarro, B. Braem, and F. Freitag , “Towards Information-Centric Edge Platform for Mesh Networks: The Case of CityLab Testbed", IEEE International Conference on Fog Computing (ICFC 2020), 2020
- M Gharbaoui, C Contoli, G Davoli, G Cuffaro, B Martini, F Paganelli, W Cerroni, P Cappanera, P Castoldi, “Demonstration of Latency-Aware and Self-Adaptive Service Chaining in 5G/SDN/NFV infrastructures”, IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), 2018
- Leroux, S., Bohez, S., De Coninck, E., Van Molle, P., Vankeirsbilck, B., Verbelen, T., Simoens, P., et al. (2019). Multi-fidelity deep neural networks for adaptive inference in the internet of multimedia things. FUTURE GENERATION COMPUTER SYSTEMS-THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ESCIENCE, 97, 355–360
