Members
Overall Objectives
Research Program
Software and Platforms
New Results
Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry
Partnerships and Cooperations
Dissemination
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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

InfraJVM - (2012–2015)

Members:

LIP6 (Regal), Ecole des Mines de Nanes (Constraint), IRISA (Triskell), LaBRI (LSR).

Funding:

ANR Infra.

Objectives:

The design of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was last revised in 1999, at a time when a single program running on a uniprocessor desktop machine was the norm. Today's computing environment, however, is radically different, being characterized by many different kinds of computing devices, which are often mobile and which need to interact within the context of a single application. Supporting such applications, involving multiple mutually untrusted devices, requires resource management and scheduling strategies that were not planned for in the 1999 JVM design. The goal of InfraJVM is to design strategies that can meet the needs of such applications and that provide the good performance that is required in an MRE.

The coordinator of InfraJVM is Gaël Thomas. Infra-JVM brings a grant of 202 000 euros from the ANR to UPMC over three years.

Nuage - (2012–2014)

Members:

Non Stop Systems (NSS), Oodrive, Alphalink (Init SYS), CELESTE, DotRiver, NewGeneration, LIP6 (Regal et Phare)

Funding:

Fonds National pour la Société Numérique, CDC

Objectives:

The Nuage project aims at designing and building an open source, energy-aware, cloud based on OpenStack. In this project, the Regal group contributes on the storage axis. In clouds, virtualization forms the basis to ensure flexibility, portability and isolation. However, the price to pay for flexibility and isolation is memory fragmentation. We thus propose to pool unused memory by allowing nodes to use memory of other nodes to extend their cache, at the kernel level.

It involves a grant of 153 000 euros over 2,5 years.

ODISEA - (2011–2014)

Members:

Orange, LIP6 (Regal), UbiStorage, Technicolor, Institut Telecom

Funding:

FUI project, Ile de France Region

Objectives:

ODISEA aims at designing new on-line data storage and data sharing solutions. Current solutions rely on big data centers, which induce many drawbacks: (i) a high cost, (ii) proprietary solutions, (iii) inefficiency (one single location, not necessarily close to the user). The goal is to tackle these issues by designing a distributed/decentralized solution that leverage edge resources like set-top boxes.

It involves a grant of 159 000 euros from Region Ile de France over three years.

Richelieu - (2012–2014)

Members:

LIP6 (Regal), Scilab Entreprise, Silkan, OCaml Pro, Inria Saclay, Arcelor Mittal, CNES, Dassault Aviation.

Funding:

FUI.

Objectives:

The goal of Richelieu is to design a new runtime for the Scilab language based on VMKit. Scilab is a scientific language and its runtime relies on a costly interpretation loop. In the Richelieu project, we propose to replace the interpretation loop by VMKit, which provides both an efficient Just In Time Compiler and advanced memory management techniques.

It involves a grant of 135 000 euros from Region Ile de France over two years.

MyCloud (2011–2014)

Members:

Inria Rhones-Alpes (SARDES), LIP6 (REGAL), EMN, WeAreCloud, Elastic Cloud.

Funding:

MyCloud project is funded by ANR Arpège.

Objectives:

Cloud Computing is a paradigm for enabling remote, on-demand access to a set of configurable computing resources. The objective of the MyCloud project is to define and implement a novel cloud model: SLAaaS (SLA aware Service). Novel models, control laws, distributed algorithms and languages will be proposed for automated provisioning, configuration and deployment of cloud services to meet SLA requirements, while tackling scalability and dynamics issues. It involves a grant of 155 000 euros from ANR to LIP6 over three years.

ConcoRDanT (2010–2014)

Members:

Inria Regal, project leader; LORIA, Universdide Nova de Lisboa

Funding:

ConcoRDanT is funded by ANR Blanc.

Objectives:

CRDTs for consistency without concurrency control in Cloud and Peer-To-Peer systems. Massive computing systems and their applications suffer from a fundamental tension between scalability and data consistency. Avoiding the synchronisation bottleneck requires highly skilled programmers, makes applications complex and brittle, and is error-prone. The ConcoRDanT project investigates a promising new approach that is simple, scales indefinitely, and provably ensures eventual consistency. A Commutative Replicated Data Type (CRDT) is a data type where all concurrent operations commute. If all replicas execute all operations, they converge; no complex concurrency control is required. We have shown in the past that CRDTs can replace existing techniques in a number of tasks where distributed users can update concurrently, such as co-operative editing, wikis, and version control. However CRDTs are not a universal solution and raise their own issues (e.g., growth of meta-data). The ConcoRDanT project engages in a systematic and principled study of CRDTs, to discover their power and limitations, both theoretical and practical. Its outcome will be a body of knowledge about CRDTs and a library of CRDT designs, and applications using them. We are hopeful that significant distributed applications can be designed using CRDTs, a radical simplification of software, elegantly reconciling scalability and consistency. ConcoRDanT involves a grant of 192 637 euros from ANR to Inria over three and a half years.

STREAMS (2010–2014)

Members:

LORIA (Score, Cassis), Inria (Regal, ASAP), Xwiki.

Funding:

STREAMS is funded by ANR Arpège.

Objectives:

Solutions for a peer-To-peer REAl-tiMe Social web The STREAMS project proposes to design peer-to-peer solutions that offer underlying services required by real-time social web applications and that eliminate the disadvantages of centralised architectures. These solutions are meant to replace a central authority-based collaboration with a distributed collaboration that offers support for decentralisation of services. The project aims to advance the state of the art on peer-to-peer networks for social and real-time applications. Scalability is generally considered as an inherent characteristic of peer-to-peer systems. It is traditionally achieved using replication techniques. Unfortunately, the current state of the art in peer-to-peer networks does not address replication of continuously updated content due to real-time user changes. Moreover, there exists a tension between sharing data with friends in a social network deployed in an open peer-to-peer network and ensuring privacy. One of the most challenging issues in social applications is how to balance collaboration with access control to shared objects. Interaction is aimed at making shared objects available to all who need them, whereas access control seeks to ensure this availability only to users with proper authorisation. STREAMS project aims at providing theoretical solutions to these challenges as well as practical experimentation. It involves a grant of 57 000 euros from ANR to Inria over three and a half years.

ABL - (2009–2013)

Members:

Gilles Muller, Julia Lawall, Gaël Thomas, Suman Saha.

Funding:

ANR Blanc.

Objectives:

The goal of the “A Bug's Life” (ABL) project is to develop a comprehensive solution to the problem of finding bugs in API usage in open source infrastructure software. The ABL project has grown out of our experience in using the Coccinelle code matching and transformation tool, which we have developed as part of the former ANR project Blanc Coccinelle, and our interactions with the Linux community. Coccinelle targets the problem of documenting and automating collateral evolutions in C code, specifically Linux code. A collateral evolution is a change that is needed in the clients of an API when the API changes in some way that affects its interface. Coccinelle provides a language for expressing collateral evolutions by means of Semantic Patches, and a transformation tool for performing them automatically.

ABL concluded in 2013 with the defense of the PhD thesis of Suman Saha in March and the publication of Saha's PhD work at the IEEE conference Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) in June. At DSN, Saha received the William C. Carter Award for best student paper. This is the only best paper award given at DSN and was the first time that the recipient was from a French university. Saha has since taken a postdoc position jointly at Harvard and Lehigh Universities.