Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

The EventCloud is an open source middleware that aims to act as a distributed datastore for data fulfiling the W3C RDF specification (http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ). It allows to store and retrieve quadruples (RDF triples with context) through SPARQL but also to manage events represented as quadruples. The EventCloud architecture is based on a structured P2P overlay network targetting high-performance elastic data processing. Consequently it aims to be deployed on infrastructures like grids, clouds, i.e. whose nodes acquisition and relinquishment can be dynamic and subject to a pay-per-use mode. Each node participating in the overlay networks constituting EventCloud instances, is responsible for managing the storage of subsets of the events, and helps in matching potential looked up events and disseminating them in a collaborative manner. As such, each node is also potentially an event broker responsible for managing subscriptions and routing notifications.

The EventCloud provides a high level publish-subscribe API where users can register their interests using SPARQL. When matching RDF data are added, subscribers are automatically notified. Recent work around the EventCloud has focused on efficient algorithms for managing subscription and notification.

OSA stands for Open Simulation Architecture. OSA (http://osa.inria.fr ) is primarily intended to be a federating platform for the simulation community: it is designed to favor the integration of new or existing contributions at every level of its architecture. The platform core supports discrete-event simulation engine(s) built on top of the ObjectWeb Consortium?s Fractal component model. In OSA, the systems to be simulated are modeled and instrumented using Fractal components. In OSA, the event handling is mostly hidden in the controller part of the components, which alleviates noticeably the modeling process, but also eases the replacement of any part of the simulation engine. Apart the simulation engine, OSA aims at integrating useful tools for modeling, developing, experimenting, and analysing simulations. OSA is also a platform for experimenting new techniques and approaches in simulation, such as aspect oriented programming, separation of concerns, innovative component architectures, and so on.

The Vercors tools (http://www-sop.inria.fr/oasis/Vercors ) include front-ends for specifying the architecture and behaviour of components in the form of UML diagrams. We translate these high-level specifications, into behavioural models in various formats, and we also transform these models using abstractions. In a final step, abstract models are translated into the input format for various verification toolsets. Currently we mainly use the various analysis modules of the CADP toolset.

We have achieved this year a major version of the platform frontend, named VCE-v3, that is now distributed on our website, and used by some of our partners. It includes integrated graphical editors for GCM component architecture descriptions, UML classes, interfaces, and state-machines. The user diagrams can be checked using the recently published validation rules from [11] ; then the corresponding GCM components can be executed using an automatic generation of the application ADL, and skeletons of Java files.

But VCE-v3 is using the Obeo-designer platform, which is a commercial product, and we have started a port to the newly available Sirius platform (http://eclipse.org/sirius/), with the goal to distribute the next major release of VCE, next year, under Sirius.