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Section: Research Program

Our research agenda

Three typical application scenarios are described in Section  4.1 :

  • Joint genetic and neuroimaging data analysis on Azure clouds;

  • Structural protein analysis on Nimbus clouds;

  • I/O intensive climate simulations for the Blue Waters post-Petascale machine.

They illustrate the above challenges in some specific ways. They all exhibit a common scheme: massively concurrent processes which access massive data at a fine granularity, where data is shared and distributed at a large scale. To efficiently address the aforementioned challenges we have started to work out an approach called BlobSeer, which stands today at the center of our research efforts. This approach relies on the design and implementation of scalable distributed algorithms for data storage and access. They combine advanced techniques for decentralized metadata and data management, with versioning-based concurrency control to optimize the performance of applications under heavy access concurrency.

Preliminary experiments with our BlobSeer BLOB management system within today's cloud software infrastructures proved very promising. Recently, we used the BlobSeer approach as a starting point to address more in depth two usage scenarios, which led to two more specific approaches: 1) Pyramid (which borrows many concepts from BlobSeer), with a specific focus on array-oriented storage; and 2) Damaris (totally independent of BlobSeer), which exploits multicore parallelism in post-Petascale supercomputers. All these directions are described below.

Our short- and medium-term research plan is devoted to storage challenges in two main contexts: clouds and post-Petascale HPC architectures. Consequently, our research plan is split in two main themes, which correspond to their respective challenges. For each of those themes, we have initiated several actions through collaborative projects coordinated by KerData, which define our agenda for the next 4 years.

Based on very promising results demonstrated by BlobSeer in preliminary experiments  [36] , we have initiated several collaborative projects in the area of cloud data management, e.g., the MapReduce ANR project, the A-Brain Microsoft-Inria project, the Z-CloudFlow Microsoft-Inria project. Such frameworks are for us concrete and efficient means to work in close connection with strong partners already well positioned in the area of cloud computing research. Thanks to these projects, we have already started to enjoy a visible scientific positioning at the international level.

The particularly active Data@ExaScale Associate Team creates the framework for an enlarged research activity involving a large number of young researchers and students. It serves as a basis for extended research activities based on our approaches, carried out beyond the frontiers of our team. In the HPC area, our presence in the research activities of the Joint UIUC-Inria Lab for Petascale Computing at Urbana-Champaign is a very exciting opportunity that we have started to leverage. It facilitates high-quality collaborations and access to some of the most powerful supercomputers, an important asset which already helped us produce and transfer some results, as described in Section  6.4 .