Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National initiatives

LABEX CominLabs

Participants : Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Davide Frey, Michel Raynal, François Taïani.

ASAP participates in the CominLabs initiative sponsored by the "Laboratoires d'Excellence" program. The initiative federates the best teams from Bretagne and Nantes regions in the broad area of telecommunications, from electronic devices to wide area distributed applications "over the top." These include, among the others, the Inria teams: ACES, ALF, ASAP, CELTIQUE, CIDRE, DISTRIBCOM, MYRIADS, TEMICS, TEXMEX, and Visages. The scope of CominLabs covers research, education, and innovation. While being hosted by academic institutions, CominLabs builds on a strong industrial ecosystem made of large companies and competitive SMEs. In this context, ASAP received funding for DeSeNt (a collaborative project with the Université de Nantes / LINA).

ANR ARPÈGE project Streams

Participants : Marin Bertier, Michel Raynal.

The Streams project started in November 2010. Beside the ASAP group, it includes teams from Inria Nancy and PARIS. Its aim it to design a real-time collaborative platform based on a peer-to-peer network. For this it is necessary to design a support architecture that offers guarantees on the propagation, security and consistency of the operations and the updates proposed by the different collaborating sites.

ANR project SocioPlug

Participants : Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Davide Frey, Michel Raynal, François Taïani.

SocioPlug is a collaborative ANR project involving Inria (ASAP team), the université de Nantes, and LIRIS (INSA Lyon and Universite Claude Bernard Lyon). The project emerges from the observation that the features offered by the Web 2.0 or by social media do not come for free. Rather they bring the implicit cost of privacy. Users are more of less consciously selling personal data for services. SocioPlug aims to provide an alternative for this model by proposing a novel architecture for large-scale, user centric applications. Instead of concentrating information of cloud platforms owned by a few economic players, we envision services made possible by cheap low-end plug computers available in every home or workplace. This will make it possible to provide a high amount of transparency to users, who will be able to decide their own optimal balance between data sharing and privacy.

DeSceNt CominLabs

Participants : Resmi Ariyattu Chandrasekharannair, Davide Frey, Michel Raynal, François Taïani.

The DeSceNt project aims to ease the writing of distributed programs on a federation of plug computers. Plug computers are a new generation of low-cost computers, such as Raspberry pi (25$), VIA- APC (49$), and ZERO Devices Z802 (75$), which offer a cheap and readily available infrastructure to deploy domestic on-line software. Plug computers open the opportunity for everyone to create cheap nano-clusters of domestic servers, host data and services and federate these resources with their friends, colleagues, and families based on social links. More particularly we will seek in this project to develop novel decentralized protocols than can encapsulate the notion of privacy-preserving federation in plug-based infrastructures. The vision is to use these protocols to provide a programming toolkit that can support the convergent data types being developed by our partner GDD (Grande Données Distribuées) at Université de Nantes.

ANR Blanc project Displexity

Participants : George Giakkoupis, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Michel Raynal.

The Displexity project started in October 2011. The aim of this ANR project that also involves researchers from Paris and Bordeaux 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 two non necessarily disjoint sub-communities, one focusing on the impact of temporal issues, while the other focusing on the impact of spatial issues on distributed algorithms.