|
|
|
| e-Pub |
Previous | 
Home
Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
ANR Displexity
Participants : Carole Gallet Delporte, Hugues Fauconnier, Pierre Fraigniaud, Amos Korman, Adrian Kosowski, Laurent Viennot.
Managed by University Paris Diderot, C. Delporte and H. Fauconnier lead this project that grants 1 Post-Doc.
Distributed computation keep raising new questions concerning computability and complexity. For instance, as far as fault-tolerant distributed computing is concerned, impossibility results do not depend on the computational power of the processes, demonstrating a form of undecidability which is significantly different from the one encountered in sequential computing. In the same way, as far as network computing is concerned, the impossibility of solving certain tasks locally does not depend on the computational power of the individual processes.
The main goal of DISPLEXITY (for DIStributed computing: computability and ComPLEXITY) is to establish the scientific foundations for building up a consistent theory of computability and complexity for distributed computing.
One difficulty to be faced by DISPLEXITY is to reconcile the different sub-communities corresponding to a variety of classes of distributed computing models. The current distributed computing community may indeed be viewed as two not necessarily disjoint sub-communities, one focusing on the impact of temporal issues, while the other focusing on the impact of spatial issues. The different working frameworks tackled by these two communities induce different objectives: computability is the main concern of the former, while complexity is the main concern of the latter.
Within DISPLEXITY, the reconciliation between the two communities will be achieved by focusing on the same class of problems, those for which the distributed outputs are interpreted as a single binary output: yes or no. Those are known as the yes/no-problems. The strength of DISPLEXITY is to gather specialists of the two main streams of distributed computing. Hence, DISPLEXITY will take advantage of the experience gained over the last decade by both communities concerning the challenges to be faced when building up a complexity theory encompassing more than a fragment of the field.
In order to reach its objectives, DISPLEXITY aims at achieving the following tasks:
-
Formalizing yes/no-problems (decision problems) in the context of distributed computing. Such problems are expected to play an analogous role in the field of distributed computing as that played by decision problems in the context of sequential computing.
-
Formalizing decision problems (yes/no-problems) in the context of distributed computing. Such problems are expected to play an analogous role in the field of distributed computing as that played by decision problems in the context of sequential computing.
-
Revisiting the various explicit (e.g., failure-detectors) or implicit (e.g., a priori information) notions of oracles used in the context of distributed computing allowing us to express them in terms of decidability/complexity classes based on oracles.
-
Identifying the impact of non-determinism on complexity in distributed computing. In particular, DISPLEXITY aims at a better understanding of the apparent lack of impact of non-determinism in the context of fault-tolerant computing, to be contrasted with the apparent huge impact of non-determinism in the context of network computing. Also, it is foreseen that non-determinism will enable the comparison of complexity classes defined in the context of fault-tolerance with complexity classes defined in the context of network computing.
-
Last but not least, DISPLEXITY will focus on new computational paradigms and frameworks, including, but not limited to distributed quantum computing and algorithmic game theory (e.g., network formation games).
The project will have to face and solve a number of challenging problems. Hence, we have built the DISPLEXITY consortium so as to coordinate the efforts of those worldwide leaders in Distributed Computing who are working in our country. A successful execution of the project will result in a tremendous increase in the current knowledge and understanding of decentralized computing and place us in a unique position in the field.
The project has been extended until June 2016.
ANR DESCARTES
Participants : Carole Gallet Delporte, Hugues Fauconnier, Pierre Fraigniaud, Adrian Kosowski, Laurent Viennot.
Cyril Gavoille (U. Bordeaux) leads this project that grants 1 Post-Doc. H. Fauconnier is the local coordinator (This project began in October 2016).
Despite the practical interests of reusable frameworks for implementing specific distributed services, many of these frameworks still lack solid theoretical bases, and only provide partial solutions for a narrow range of services. We argue that this is mainly due to the lack of a generic framework that is able to unify the large body of fundamental knowledge on distributed computation that has been acquired over the last 40 years. The DESCARTES project aims at bridging this gap, by developing a systematic model of distributed computation that organizes the functionalities of a distributed computing system into reusable modular constructs assembled via well-defined mechanisms that maintain sound theoretical guarantees on the resulting system. DESCARTES arises from the strong belief that distributed computing is now mature enough to resolve the tension between the social needs for distributed computing systems, and the lack of a fundamentally sound and systematic way to realize these systems.