Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR ConcoRDanT ANR-10-BLAN-0208 (2010–2014)

Participants : Pascal Urso [contact] , Mehdi Ahmed-Nacer, Claudia-Lavinia Ignat, Gérald Oster.

Partners:

REGAL project-team (Inria Paris - Rocquencourt / LIP6, coordinator), CITI institute (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal), GDD team (University of Nantes) and SCORE team.

Website:

http://concordant.lip6.fr/

Massive computing systems and their applications suffer from a fundamental tension between scalability and data consistency. Avoiding the synchronisation bottleneck requires highly skilled programmers, makes applications complex and brittle, and is error-prone.

The ConcoRDanT project (oct. 2010 – apr. 2014) investigates a promising new approach that is simple, scales, and provably ensures eventual consistency. A Commutative Replicated Data Type (CRDT) is a data type where all concurrent operations commute. If all replicas execute all operations, they converge; no complex concurrency control is required. We have shown in the past that CRDTs can replace existing techniques in a number of tasks where distributed users can update concurrently, such as co-operative editing, wikis, and version control. However CRDTs are not a universal solution and raise their own issues (e.g., growth of meta-data).

The ConcoRDanT project engages in a systematic and principled study of CRDTs, to discover their power and limitations, both theoretical and practical. Its outcome will be a body of knowledge about CRDTs and a library of CRDT designs, and applications using them. We are hopeful that significant distributed applications can be designed using CRDTs, a radical simplification of software, elegantly reconciling scalability and consistency.

ANR STREAMS ANR-10-SEGI-010 (2010–2014)

Participants : Gérald Oster [coordinator] , Luc André, Claudia-Lavinia Ignat, Stéphane Martin, Pascal Urso, Hien Thi Thu Truong.

Partners:

SCORE team (coordinator), ASAP project-team (University of Rennes 1 / Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique), CASSIS project-team (Inria Nancy - Grand Est / Nancy University), REGAL project-team (Inria Paris - Rocquencourt / LIP6) and GDD team (University of Nantes / LINA)

Website:

http://streams.loria.fr/

The STREAMS project (nov. 2010 – oct. 2013) proposes to design peer-to-peer solutions that offer underlying services required by real-time social web applications and that reduce the disadvantages of centralised architectures. These solutions are meant to replace a central authority-based collaboration with a distributed collaboration that offers support for decentralisation of services.

The STREAMS project aims to advance the state of the art on peer-to-peer networks for social and real-time applications. Scalability is generally considered as an inherent characteristic of peer-to-peer systems. It is traditionally achieved using replication techniques. Unfortunately, the current state of the art in peer-to-peer networks does not address replication of continuously updated content due to real-time user changes. Moreover, there exists a tension between sharing data with friends in a social network deployed in an open peer-to-peer network and ensuring privacy. One of the most challenging issue in social applications is how to balance collaboration with access control to shared objects. Interaction is aimed at making shared objects available to all who need them, whereas access control seeks to ensure this availability only to users with proper authorisation. STREAMS project aims at providing theoretical solutions to these challenges as well as practical experimentations.

ANR Kolflow (2011–2014)

Participant : Gérôme Canals.

Partners:

GDD team (University of Nantes / LINA), Loria (Orpailleur and SCORE Teams), Silex Team (LIRIS, University of Lyon), Edelweiss (Inria Project).

Website:

http://kolflow.univ-nantes.fr/mediawiki/index.php

Kolflow aims at building a social semantic space where humans collaborate with smart agents in order to produce knowledge understandable by humans and machines. Humans are able to understand the actions of smart agents. Smart agents are able to understand actions of humans. Kolflow targets the co-evolution of content and knowledge as the result of interactions of humans and machines. Our work in the Kolflow project focus on implementing knowledge base testing strategies [23] .

FSN OpenPaaS (2012–2015)

Participants : Olivier Perrin, Ahmed Bouchami.

Partners:

Samovar team (Telecom SudParis), SCORE team (Université de Lorraine, Loria), ARMINES (Ecole des Mines d'Albi), Brake France, Linagora.

Website:

http://www.open-paas.org

The OpenPaaS project aims at developing a PaaS (Platform as a Service) technology dedicated to enterprise collaborative applications deployed on hybrid clouds (private/public). OpenPaaS is a platform that allows to design and deploy applications based on proven technologies provided by partners such as collaborative messaging systems, integration and workflow technologies that will be extended in order to address Cloud Computing requirements. Available as an open-source Enterprise Social Network, the OpenPaaS project innovates both at the collaborative level and by its capacity to leverage heterogeneous cloud technologies at the IaaS level (Infrastructure as a Service). This project is funded under the French FSN umbrella (Fond National pour la société Numérique).