Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

SENSATION  (http://sensation-project.eu/ ) (Self ENergy-Supporting Autonomous computaTION) is a European project no. 318490 funded by the FP7-ICT-11-8 programme. It gathers 9 participants: Inria (ESTASYS and CONVECS project-teams), Aalborg University (Denmark), RWTH Aachen and Saarland University (Germany), University of Twente (The Netherlands), GomSpace (Denmark), and Recore Systems (The Netherlands). The main goal of SENSATION is to increase the scale of systems that are self-supporting by balancing energy harvesting and consumption up to the level of complete products. In order to build such Energy Centric Systems, embedded system designers face the quest for optimal performance within acceptable reliability and tight energy bounds. Programming systems that reconfigure themselves in view of changing tasks, resources, errors, and available energy is a demanding challenge.

SENSATION started on October 1st, 2012 for three years. CONVECS contributes to the project regarding the extension of formal languages with quantitative aspects (see §  6.3.1 ), studying common semantic models for quantitative analysis, and applying formal modeling and analysis to the case studies provided by the industrial partners (see §  6.5.6 ).

The CONVECS project-team is member of the FMICS (Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems) working group of ERCIM  (http://fmics.inria.fr ). R. Mateescu was the chairman of the FMICS working group until November 1st, 2014. H. Garavel is member of the FMICS board, in charge of dissemination actions.

H. Garavel was appointed to a new Working Group within Informatics Europe: “Parallel Computing (Supercomputing) Education in Europe: State-of-Art”. This is a relatively small working group (about 10 people) with the following missions: to show the need for urgent changes in higher education in the area of computational sciences, to compose a survey of the current landscape of parallel computing and supercomputing education in Europe with respect to different universities and countries, and to prepare a set of recommendations on how to bring ideas of parallel computing and supercomputing into higher educational systems of European countries.

• Saarland University (Alexander Graf-Brill, Holger Hermanns, and Felix Freiberger),

• RWTH Aachen (Joost-Pieter Katoen and Xiaoxiao Yang),

• Oxford University (Ernst-Moritz Hahn and Marta Kwiatkowska),

• University of Birmingham (Dave Parker),

• Technical University of Eindhoven (Anton Wijs),

• University of Twente (Marieke Huisman and Jaco van de Pol),

• University of Málaga (Carlos Canal, Francisco Duran and Ernesto Pimentel), and

• Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg (Monika Heiner).

Our partnership with Saarland University was sustained by the Humboldt Forschungspreis received by H. Garavel, who continued his regular visits to Saarland University.