Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR SONGS

Participant : Fabien Mathieu.

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.

ANR Prose

Participants : Pierre Fraigniaud, Amos Korman, Laurent Viennot.

Managed by University Paris Diderot, P. Fraigniaud.

Online social networks are among the most popular sites on the Web and continue to grow rapidly. They provide mechanisms to establish identities, share content and information, and create relationships. With the emergence of a new generation of powerful mobile devices that enable wireless ad hoc communication, it is time to extend social networking to the mobile world. Such an ad hoc social networking environment is full of opportunities. As opposed to the use of personal computers, a mobile phone is a strictly personal device, always on, with several wireless interfaces that include a short range communication with nearby nodes. Applications such as notification of status updates, sharing of user generated content, documents tagging, rating/recommendation and bookkeeping can be deployed “on the move” on top of contacts established through short range communication. It requires to deploy social networking applications in a delay tolerant manner using opportunistic social contacts as in a peer to peer network, as well as new advanced content recommendation engines.

The Prose project is a collective and multi-disciplinary effort to design opportunistic contact sharing schemes, and characterizes the environmental conditions, the usage constraint, as well as the algorithmic and architecture principles that let them operate. The partners of the Prose project will engage in this exploration through various expertise: network measurement, traffic monitoring from a real application, system design, behavioral study, analysis of distributed algorithms, theory of dynamic graph, networking modeling, and performance evaluation. As part of this project, the partners will be involved in the analysis of the content received and accessed by users of a real commercial application (PlayAdz), and will participate to the design of a new promotion advertisement service.

ANR Shaman

Participants : Carole Delporte-Gallet, Hugues Fauconnier, Hung Tran-The.

SHAMAN (Self-organizing and Healing Architectures for Malicious and Adversarial Networks) is an ANR VERSO Project (2009-2012).

Managed by University Paris Diderot, H. Fauconnier leads this project that grants Ph. D. H. Tran-The.

SHAMAN focuses on the algorithmic foundations of resource-constrained autonomous large scale systems, dedicated to enabling the sustainability of network functions in spite of abrupt system evolutions, component failures, and attacks. We foresee original solutions in the general frameworks of self-stabilization, failure detection, and robust protocols. Our first objective is the design of obligate but realistic models encompassing anonymity, dynamism, and/or malicious behavior. Our second objective is to evaluate both the theoretical power, and the practical functionality, of these models, by confronting them to their ability of designing efficient algorithms and protocols for dynamic and malicious environments. This evaluation will be tackled in two complementary application domains: wireless sensor networks, and peer-to-peer systems. The primary outcome of SHAMAN should be the demonstration of reliable middleware bricks that could be integrated in real distributed platforms.

ANR Displexity

Participants : Carole Delporte-Gallet, Hugues Fauconnier, Pierre Fraigniaud, Arfoui Heger, Amos Korman, Hung Tran-The, Laurent Viennot.

Managed by University Paris Diderot, C. Delporte and H. Fauconnier lead this project that grants 1 Ph. D.

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.