Section: Overall Objectives

From Oasis to Scale

The Scale team aims at contributing to the safety of distributed applications, in particular through the research and development of programming models and runtime environments adapted to modern distributed architectures.

Since 2000, the Oasis team, successively led by Isabelle Attali, Denis Caromel, and Eric Madelaine has done research in the fields of distributed systems, semantics, and active objects, addressing problems in formal models and calculi, programming languages, and middleware for developing distributed applications.

Since 2013, the Scale group (Safe Composition of adaptable Applications and Large-scale execution Environment) has succeeded to Oasis . Scale maintains the balance and strong links between theory and application that made the success of Oasis . However, while Oasis was more focused on Grid-Computing and programming models for HPC, Scale is more interested in the support for multi-scale and multi-level parallelism.

Indeed, a common programming idiom is to dissociate local parallelism targeted at multicore machines and distributed aspects, sometimes with several levels of distribution. The research in Scale aims at providing a unified approach for multi-level parallel applications, with extended coverage of all forms and levels of parallelism, from multi-core to federation of clouds, with a strong focus on safety.

In 2014, we were informed that the common team SCALE between Inria and I3S would not be continued. As a consequence, SCALE will be terminated as an Inria team at the end of 2015, and will continue as a standard I3S project.