Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Plate-form(E)${}^3$

(2012-2015, 87k€) has been accepted in 2012 in the ANR SEED program. It deals with the design and implementation of a multi-scale computing and optimization platform for energetic efficiency in industrial environment. It gathers 7 partners either academic (LEMTA, Fédération Charles Hermite (including AlGorille), Mines Paris, INDEED) or industrial (IFPEN, EDF, IDEEL). We will contribute to the design and development of the platform. The engineer P. Kalitine has been recruited to work on this project from May 2014 to June 2015.

ANR SONGS

(2012–2015, 1800k€) Martin Quinson is also the principal investigator of this project, funded by the ANR INFRA program. SONGS (Simulation Of Next Generation Systems) aims at increasing the target community of SimGrid to two new research domains, namely Clouds (restricted to the Infrastructure as a Service context) and High Performance Computing. We develop new models and interfaces to enable the use of SimGrid for generic and specialized researches in these domains.

As project leading team, we are involved in most parts of this project, which allows the improvement of our tool even further and sets it as the reference in its domain (see Section 6.2.1 ).

AEN Hemera

(2010-2014, 2k€) aims at demonstrating ambitious up-scaling techniques for large scale distributed computing by carrying out several dimensioning experiments on the Grid'5000 infrastructure, and at animating and enlarging the scientific community around the testbed. M. Quinson, L. Nussbaum and S. Genaud lead three working groups, respectively on simulating large-scale facilities, on conducting large and complex experimentations on real platforms, and on designing scientific applications for scalability.

Other partners: 20 research teams in France, see https://www.grid5000.fr/mediawiki/index.php/Hemera for details.

ADT Aladdin-G5K (2007-2014, 200k€ locally)

aims at the construction of a scientific instrument for experiments on large-scale parallel and distributed systems, building on the Grid'5000 testbed (http://www.grid5000.fr/ ). It structures Inria 's leadership role (8 of the 9 Grid'5000 sites) concerning this platform. The technical team is now composed of 10 engineers, of which 2 are currently hosted in the AlGorille team. As a member of the executive committee, L. Nussbaum is in charge of following the work of the technical team, together with the Grid'5000 technical director.

Other partners: EPI DOLPHIN, GRAAL, MESCAL, MYRIADS, OASIS, REGAL, RESO, RUNTIME, IRIT (Toulouse), Université de Reims - Champagne Ardennes

ADT LAPLACE

(2014-2016, AlGorille is major partner, 100k€) builds upon the foundations of the Grid'5000 testbed to reinforce and extend it towards new use cases and scientific challenges. Several directions are being explored: networks and Software Defined Networking, Big Data, HPC, and production computation needs. Already developed prototypes are also being consolidated, and the necessary improvements to user management and tracking are also being performed.

ADT Cosette

(2013-2016, AlGorille is the only partner, 120k€), for COherent SET of Tools for Experimentation aims at developing or improving a tool suite for experimentation at large scale on testbeds such as Grid'5000. Specifically, we will work on (1) the development of Ruby-CUTE, a library gathering features useful when performing such experiments; (2) the porting of Kadeploy, Distem and XPFlow on top of Ruby-CUTE; (3) the release of XPFlow, developed in the context of Tomasz Buchert's PhD; (4) the improvement of the Distem emulator to address new scientific challenges in Cloud and HPC. E. Jeanvoine (SED) is delegated in the AlGorille team for the duration of this project.

Inria Project Lab MultiCore

(2013-) Supporting multicore processors in an efficient way is still a scientific challenge. This project introduces a novel approach based on virtualization and dynamicity, in order to mask hardware heterogeneity, and to let performance scale with the number and nature of cores. Our main partner within this project is the Camus team on the Strasbourg site. The move of J. Gustedt there, has strengthened the collaboration within this project.

ADT PLM

(2014-2016, Martin Quinson is leading this project in collaboration with G. Oster from the Coast project-team, 100k€) This project is not directly in line with the goal of the AlGorille project-team, as its goal is to establish an experimental platform to study of the didactic of informatics, specifically centered on introductory programming courses.

The project builds upon a pedagogical programming exerciser developed for our own teaching, and improves this base in several ways. We want to provide more adapted feedback to the learners, and gather more data to better understand how beginners learn programming.