Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

FUI CompatibleOne Project, 2010-2012

Participants : Laurent Lefevre, Julien Carpentier, Maxime Morel, Olivier Mornard.

The project CompatibleOne (Nov 2010-Nov 2012) funded by the Fonds Unique Interministériel (FUI) is dealing with the building of a Cloud architecture open software stack.

CompatibleOne is an open source project with the aim of providing interoperable middleware for the description and federation of heterogeneous clouds comprising resources provisioned by different cloud providers. Services provided by Inria participation (module COEES) should allow to act on the system's core by offering a scenario for the broker using energy constraints. These constraints should allow virtual machines placement and displacement using energy profile. Collected data must be available for CO and other systems for future researches. We took part in the analysis of the specification of the system. Mainly, we are in charge of the energy efficiency module. We also had participation in several modules like COMONS (monitoring module), ACCORDS (brokering module), EZVM (virtualization module) and CONETS (networking module). To make energy measurement, we used hardware probes and we studied software probes too. We evaluated several probes providers like Eaton and Schleifenbauer which provide smart PDU (Power Distribution Unit). We also evaluated IPMI board provided by DELL, our computers manufacturer, and OmegaWatt, a small company which provides custom hardware for energy measurement.

In this project, our work is focused on the design and provisioning of energy aware and energy efficient components in order to include energy aspects in QoS, SLAs and billing in clouds architectures. We lead the task T3.4 on energy management and will participate in activities on virtual machines design and migration [13] .

FSN XLcloud, 2012-2014

Participants : Jean-Patrick Gelas, Laurent Lefevre, Francois Rossigneux.

Focused on high-performance computing, the XLcloud collaborative project sets out to define and demonstrate a cloud platform based on HPC-as-a-Service. This is designed for computational intensive workloads, with interactive remote visualisation capabilities, thus allowing different users to work on a common platform. XLcloud project's members design, develop and integrate the software elements of a High Performance Cloud Computing (HPCC) System.

Expected results of the projects include : Functional and technical specification of the XLcloud platform architecture, open source API of the XLcloud platform, implementation of algorithms for 3D and video streaming display, prototype of the XLcloud platform including the support of on-demand virtual clusters and remote visualisation service, use cases for validation, illustrating the performance and suggesting future improvements.

XLcloud aims at overcoming some of the most important challenges of implementing operationally high performance applications in the Cloud. The goal is to allow partners of the project to take leadership position in the market, as cloud service providers, or as technology providers. XLcloud relies on a consortium of various partners (BULL (project leader), TSP, Silkan, EISTI, Ateme, Inria, CEA List, OW2, AMG.Lab).

In this project, the Avalon team investigates the issue of energy awareness and energy efficiency in OpenStack Cloud based platforms.

ANR ARPEGE MapReduce (Scalable data management for Map-Reduce-based data-intensive applications on cloud and hybrid infrastructures), 4 years, ANR-09-JCJC-0056-01, 2010-2013

Participants : Frédéric Desprez, Gilles Fedak, Sylvain Gault, Christian Pérez, Anthony Simonet.

MapReduce is a parallel programming paradigm successfully used by large Internet service providers to perform computations on massive amounts of data. After being strongly promoted by Google, it has also been implemented by the open source community through the Hadoop project, maintained by the Apache Foundation and supported by Yahoo! and even by Google itself. This model is currently getting more and more popular as a solution for rapid implementation of distributed data-intensive applications. The key strength of the MapReduce model is its inherently high degree of potential parallelism.

In this project, the Avalon team participates to several work packages which address key issues such as efficient scheduling of several MapReduce applications, integration using components on large infrastructures, security and dependability, and MapReduce for Desktop Grid.

ANR grant: COOP (Multi Level Cooperative Resource Management), 3.5 years, ANR-09-COSI-001-01, 2009-2013

Participants : Frédéric Desprez, Cristian Klein, Christian Pérez.

The main goals of this project are to set up a cooperation as general as possible between programming models and resource management systems and to develop algorithms for efficient resource selection. In particular, the project targets the SALOME platform and the GRID-TLSE expert-site (http://gridtlse.org/ ) as an example of programming models, and PadicoTM, Diet and XtreemOS as examples of communication manager, grid middleware and distributed operating systems.

The project is led by Christian Pérez.

ANR grant SPADES (Servicing Petascale Architectures and DistributEd System), 3.5 years, 08-ANR-SEGI-025, 2009-2012

Participants : Eddy Caron, Florent Chuffart, Frédéric Suter, Haiwu He.

Today's emergence of Petascale architectures and evolutions of both research grids and computational grids increase a lot the number of potential resources. However, existing infrastructures and access rules do not allow to fully take advantage of these resources. One key idea of the SPADES project is to propose a non-intrusive but highly dynamic environment able to take advantage of the available resources without disturbing their native use. In other words, the SPADES vision is to adapt the desktop grid paradigm by replacing users at the edge of the Internet by volatile resources. These volatile resources are in fact submitted via batch schedulers to reservation mechanisms which are limited in time or susceptible to preemption (best-effort mode).

One of the priorities of SPADES is to support platforms at a very large scale. Petascale environments are therefore particularly considered. Nevertheless, these next-generation architectures still suffer from a lack of expertise for an accurate and relevant use. One of the SPADES goal is to show how to take advantage of the power of such architectures. Another challenge of SPADES is to provide a software solution for a service discovery system able to face a highly dynamic platform. This system will be deployed over volatile nodes and thus must tolerate failures. SPADES will propose solutions for the management of distributed schedulers in Desktop Computing environments, coping with a co-scheduling framework.

ANR grant: USS SimGrid (Ultra Scalable Simulation with SimGrid), 3.8 years, ANR-08-SEGI-022, 2008-2012

Participants : Frédéric Desprez, Matthieu Imbert, Georges Markomanolis, Frédéric Suter.

The USS-SimGrid project aims at Ultra Scalable Simulations with SimGrid. This tool is leader in the simulation of HPC settings, and the main goal of this project is to allow its use in the simulation of desktop grids and peer-to-peer settings. The planned work is to improve the models used in SimGrid (increasing their scalability and easing their instantiation), provide associate tools for experimenters (result analysis assistants and test campaign managers), and increase the simulation kernel scalability by parallelization and optimization. The project also aims at producing a scientific instrument directly usable by a large community and is well adapted to the needs of various users.

ANR grant: SONGS (Simulation Of Next Generation Systems), 4 years, ANR-12-INFRA-11, 2012-2015

Participants : Frédéric Desprez, Georges Markomanolis, Jonathan Rouzaud-Cornabas, Frédéric Suter.

The last decade has brought tremendous changes to the characteristics of large scale distributed computing platforms. Large grids processing terabytes of information a day and the peer-to-peer technology have become common even though understanding how to efficiently such platforms still raises many challenges. As demonstrated by the USS SimGrid project, simulation has proved to be a very effective approach for studying such platforms. Although even more challenging, we think the issues raised by petaflop/exaflop computers and emerging cloud infrastructures can be addressed using similar simulation methodology.

The goal of the SONGS project is to extend the applicability of the SimGrid simulation framework from Grids and Peer-to-Peer systems to Clouds and High Performance Computation systems. Each type of large-scale computing system will be addressed through a set of use cases and lead by researchers recognized as experts in this area.

Any sound study of such systems through simulations relies on the following pillars of simulation methodology: Efficient simulation kernel; Sound and validated models; Simulation analysis tools; Campaign simulation management.

ANR JCJC: Clouds@Home (Cloud Computing over Unreliable, Shared Resources), 4 years, ANR-09-JCJC-0056-01, 2009-2012

Participants : Gilles Fedak, Bing Tang.

Recently, a new vision of cloud computing has emerged where the complexity of an IT infrastructure is completely hidden from its users. At the same time, cloud computing platforms provide massive scalability, 99.999% reliability, and improved performance at relatively low costs for complex applications and services. This project, lead by D. Kondo from Inria MESCAL investigates the use of cloud computing for large-scale and demanding applications and services over unreliable resources. In particular, we target volunteered resources distributed over the Internet. In this project, G. Fedak leads the Data management task (WP3).

Inria ADT BitDew, 2 years, 2010-2012

Participants : Gilles Fedak, José Saray.

ADT BitDew is an Inria support action of technological development for the BitDew middleware. Objectives are several fold : i/ provide documentation and education material for end-users, ii/ improve software quality and support, iii/ develop new features allowing the management of Cloud and Grid resources.

Inria ADT Aladdin, 4 years, 2008-2014

Participants : Simon Delamare, Frédéric Desprez, Matthieu Imbert, Laurent Lefèvre, Christian Pérez.

ADT ALADDIN is an Inria support action of technological development which supports the Grid'5000 instrument. Frédéric Desprez is leading this action (with David Margery from Rennes as the Technical Director).

Inria Large Scale Initiative HEMERA, 4 years, 2010-2013

Participants : Daniel Balouek, Christian Pérez, Laurent Pouilloux.

Hemera deals with the scientific animation of the Grid'5000 community. It aims at making progress in the understanding and management of large scale infrastructure by leveraging competences distributed in various French teams. Hemera contains several scientific challenges and working groups. The project involves around 24 teams located in all around France.

C. Pérez is leading the project; D. Balouek and L. Pouilloux are managing scientific challenges on Grid'5000 .