Section: Scientific Foundations

Algorithms and Software Architectures for Service Oriented Platforms

Participants : Daniel Balouek, Nicolas Bard, Julien Bigot, Yves Caniou, Eddy Caron, Florent Chuffart, Simon Delamare, Frédéric Desprez, Gilles Fedak, Sylvain Gault, Haiwu He, Cristian Klein, Georges Markomanolis, Adrian Muresan, Christian Pérez, Vincent Pichon, Jonathan Rouzaud-Cornabas, Anthony Simonet, José Francisco Saray Villamizar, Bing Tang.

The fast evolution of hardware capabilities in terms of wide area communication as well as of machine virtualization leads to the requirement of another step in the abstraction of resources with respect to applications. Those large scale platforms based on the aggregation of large clusters (Grids), supercomputers, huge datacenters (Clouds) or collections of volunteer PCs (Desktop computing platforms) are now available for researchers of different fields of science as well as private companies. This variety of platforms and the way they are accessed have also an important impact on how applications are designed (i.e., the programming model used) as well as how applications are executed (i.e., the runtime/middleware system used). The access to these platforms is driven through the use of different services providing mandatory features such as security, resource discovery, virtualization, load-balancing, etc. Software as a Service (SaaS) has thus to play an important role in the future development of large scale applications. The overall idea is to consider the whole system, ranging from the resources to the application, as a set of services. Hence, a user application is an ordered set of instructions requiring and making uses of some services like for example an execution service. Such a service is also an application—but at the middleware level—that is proposing some services (here used by the user application) and potentially using other services like for example a scheduling service. This model based on services provided and/or offered is generalized within software component models which deal with composition issues as well as with deployment issues.

Our goal is to contribute to the design of programming models supporting a wide range of architectures and to their implementation by mastering the various algorithmic issues involved and by studying the impact on application-level algorithms. Ideally, an application should be written once; the complexity is to determine the adequate level of abstraction to provide a simple programming model to the developer while enabling efficient execution on a wide range of architectures. To achieve such a goal, the team plans to contribute at different level including programming models, distributed algorithms, deployment of services, services discovery, service composition and orchestration, large scale data management, etc.