Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Christine Morin contributed to the edition of the 2011-2014 activity report of the Inria@SiliconValley Inria International Lab (https://project.inria.fr/siliconvalley/files/2015/06/Inria@SV_Activity_Report_2011_2014.pdf ).

Christine Morin was one of the co-organizers of the BIS 2015 workshop held in Berkeley in May 2015 in the framework of the Inria@Silicon Valley Inria International Lab. Deb Agarwal co-chaired the panel on Big Data Science. Christine Morin chaired one of the two keynotes sessions.

DALHIS

Participants : Christine Morin, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Javier Rojas Balderrama, Matthieu Simonin, Arnab Sinha, Cédric Tedeschi.

• Title: Data Analysis on Large Heterogeneous Infrastructures for Science

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA

  • Data Science and Technology department

  • French PI: Christine Morin

  • American PI: Deb Agarwal, head of the Data Science and Technology department

• Duration: 2013 - 2015

• See also: https://project.inria.fr/dalhis/

• The worldwide scientific community is generating large datasets at increasing rates causing data analysis to emerge as one of the primary modes of science. Existing data analysis methods, tools and infrastructure are often difficult to use and unable to handle the “data deluge”. A scientific data analysis environment needs to address three key challenges: a) programmability: easily composable and reusable programming environments for analysis algorithms and pipeline execution, b) agility: software that can adapt quickly to changing demands and resources, and, c) scalability: take advantage of all available resource environments including desktops, clusters, grids, clouds and HPC environments. The goal of the DALHIS associated team is to coordinate research and create together a software ecosystem to facilitate data analysis seamlessly across desktops, HPC and cloud environments. Specifically, our end goal is to build a dynamic environment that is user-friendly, scalable, energy-efficient and fault tolerant through coordination of existing projects. We plan to design a programming environment for scientific data analysis workflows that will allow users to easily compose their workflows in a programming environment such as Python and execute them on diverse high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud resources. We will develop an orchestration layer for coordinating resource and application characteristics. The adaptation model will use real-time data mining to support elasticity, fault-tolerance, energy efficiency and provenance. We investigate how to provide execution environments that allow users to seamlessly execute their dynamic data analysis workflows in various research environments.

  The work done in 2015 on scientific workflows and energy efficiency is described respectively in 7.6.1 and 7.4.2 .

  The recent results of the DALHIS associate team were presented by Lavanya Ramakrishnan from LBNL during the working session on Scientific and Large Scale Computing. Christine Morin, Anne-Cécile Orgerie and Deb Agarwal participated in the BIS 2015 workshop held in Berkeley in May 2015.

  Deb Agarwal has been awarded an Inria International Chair for the 2015-2019 period enabling long visits in the Myriads team. She was hosted in Myriads team during 2.5 months from May 1st to July 10th 2015. During this visit, we initiated the work on the design of a mobile application for reliable field data collection for FluxNet. Critical to the interpretation of global Fluxnet carbon flux dataset is the ancillary information and measurements taken at the measurement tower sites (e.g. vegetation species, leaf area index, instrument calibrations, etc). The submission and update of this data using excel sheets is difficult and error prone. In 2015, the team developed some initial sketches of the User Interface design for a mobile application for the reliable collection of FluxNet data and Arnab Sinha, Deb Agarwal, and Christine Morin performed an initial usability feedback interview with Chris Flechard (INRA Rennes), a CarboEurope participant who collects carbon flux data at several sites in Brittany. M. Sandesh (LBL) simultaneously performed a couple of usability interviews at Berkeley. We updated the design based on the combined feedback. Currently, the mobile application prototype development is in progress. The design was presented by Dario Papale at the ICOS meeting in September 2015. The expectation is that the design will be adopted by ICOS (European flux towers) and AmeriFlux (flux towers in the Americas). A first basic working demonstration prototype has been developed.

Northeastern University

We started a collaboration with Professor Gene Cooperman, Northeastern University, Boston, USA on the design of a cloud agnostic checkpointing service on top of IaaS clouds for reliable application execution, inter-cloud application migration and easing application "cloudification". Gene Cooperman was hosted in Myriads team during a week in June 2015.

ORNL/TTU

We collaborate on cloud computing with Stephen Scott, Professor at Tennessee Tech University (TTU) and researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the USA. He participed in Anna Giannakou's mid-PhD thesis defense in October 2015.

University of Guadalajara

Nikolaos Parlavantzas is collaborating with the team of Prof. Héctor Duran-Limon of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, on adaptive resource management in cloud environments.

VU University Amsterdam

We collaborate with Thilo Kielmann's research group at VU University Amsterdam on research and development around the ConPaaS system. This collaboration has lead to a joint publication this year [24] .

EPFL

We collaborate with Katerina Argyraki's research group on the integration of networking and cloud computing technologies in order to support placement constraints between cloud resources. This collaboration has been supported thanks to the extended visit of Georgios Ioannidis in Rennes in the context of the HARNESS project, and it is expected to continue after the end of HARNESS. At least one joint publication on this topic is currently in preparation.