Onelab's original starting point and main collaboration is with PlanetLab Central, the PlanetLab worldwide headquarters that are based at Princeton University in the United States. PlanetLab is a global research network that supports the development of new network services. Since 2003, more than 1,000 researchers at top academic institutions and industrial research labs have used PlanetLab to develop new technologies for distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and query processing.

Figure: Map showing PlanetLab nodes worldwide.

Professor Serge Fdida, of Onelab coordinating partner UPMC, sits on PlanetLab Central's Steering Committee. Thierry Parmentelat, Technical Director of OneLab, and key researcher at lead partner INIRA, is a core contributor to the PlanetLab code base. The management teams of PlanetLab Europe and PlanetLab Central are in constant contact, and personnel regularly exchange extended visits.

The worldwide PlanetLab system currently consists of 1037 nodes at 505 sites.