Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

Joint industrial PhD with Orange Labs and Renault

• Orange Lab, 30,000 euros for 1 PhD Students (CIFRE), Ralucca Diaconu

• Renault, 60,000 over 3 years (2013 - 2016) for a CIFRE. In the context of a Cifre cooperation with Renault, we are supervising with Whipser the PhD of Antoine Blin on the topic of scheduling processes on a multicore machine for the automotive industry. The goal is to allow real-time and multimedia applications to cohabit on a single processor. The challenge here is to control resource consumption of non real-time processes so as to preserve the real-time behavior of critical ones. As part of this cooperation, we will use the Bossa DSL framework for implementing process schedulers that we have previously developed.

Joint industrial PhD: CRDTs for Large-Scale Storage Systems, with Scality SA

This year, we continued the joint CIFRE (industrial PhD) research of Tao Thanh Vinh, with the French start-up company Scality , as described above (under “Large-Scale File Systems”).

The objective of this research is to design new algorithms for file and block storage systems, considering both the issues of scaling the file naming tree to a very large size, and the issue of conflicting updates to files or to the name tree, in the case of high latency or disconnected work. Preliminary results were published at Systor 2015 [58] .

EMR CREDIT, with Thales.

Franck Petit and Swan Dubois participate to the creation of the EMR (Equipe Mixte de Recherche) CREDIT, (Compréhension, Représentation et Exploitation Des Interactions Temporelles) between LIP6/UPMC and Thales.

Nowadays, networks are the field of temporal interactions that occur in many settings networks, including security issues. The amount and the speed of such interactions increases everyday. Until recently, the dynamics of these objects was little studied due to the lack of appropriate tools and methods. However, it becomes crucial to understand the dynamics of these interactions. Typically, how can we detect failures or attacks in network traffic, fraud in financial transactions, bugs or attacks traces of software execution. More generally, we seek to identify patterns in the dynamics of interactions. Recently, several different approaches have been proposed to study such interactions. For instance, by merging all interactions taking place over a period (e.g. one day) in a graph that are studied thereafter (evolving graphs). Another approach was to built meta-objects by duplicating entities at each unit of time of their activity, and by connecting them together.

The goal of the EMR is to join both teams of LIP6 and Thales on these issues. More specifically, we hope to make significant progress on security issues such as anomaly detection. This requires the use of a formalism sufficiently expressive to formulate complex temporal properties. Recently, a vast collection of concepts, formalisms, and models has been unified in a framework called Time-Varying Graphs. We want to pursuit that way. In the short run, the challenges facing us are: $\left(1\right)$ refine the model to capture some interaction patterns, $\left(2\right)$ design of algorithms to separate sequences of interactions, $\left(3\right)$ Identify classes of entities playing a particular role in the dynamics, such as bridges between communities, or sources and sinks.

Joint industrial PhDs: data sharing in mobile networks and automatic resizing of shared I/O caches, with Magency

Magency organizes large events during which participants can use mobile devices to access related data and interact together.

The thesis of Lyes Hamidouche concerns efficient data sharing among a large number of mobile devices. Magency brings traces captured during real events (data accesses and user mobility). We are jointly working on the design of algorithms allowing a large number of mobile devices to efficiently access remote data.

Magency also runs servers. A server is used before an event in order to be prepared and tested, and then, during the event to serve the numerous mobile devices accesses. Many servers are run on a single physical machine using containers. Using this configuration, the memory is partitioned, leading to poor performances for applications that need a large amount of memory for caching purpose. In the context of Damien Carver's PhD thesis, we are designing kernel-level mechanisms that automatically give more memory to the most active containers, leveraging the expertise acquired during Maxime Lorrillere's PhD thesis.