Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

Microsoft: Z-CloudFlow (2013–2016).

In the framework of the Joint Inria-Microsoft Research Center, this project is a follow-up to the A-Brain project. The goal of this new project is to propose a framework for the efficient processing of scientific workflows in clouds. This approach will leverage the cloud infrastructure capabilities for handling and processing large data volumes.

In order to support data-intensive workflows, the cloud-based solution will: adapt the workflows to the cloud environment and exploit its capabilities; optimize data transfers to provide reasonable times; manage data and tasks so that they can be efficiently placed and accessed during execution.

The validation will be performed using real-life applications, first on the Grid5000 platform, then on the Azure cloud environment, access being granted by Microsoft through a Azure for Research Award received by G. Antoniu. The project also provides funding for the PhD thesis of Luis Pineda-Morales, started in 2014.

Collaboration.

The project is being conducted in collaboration with the Zenith team from Montpellier, led by Patrick Valduriez.

Huawei: HIRP Low-Latency Storage for Stream Data (2016–2017).

The goal of this project is to explore the plausible paths towards a dedicated storage solution for low-latency stream storage. Such a solution should provide on the one hand traditional storage functionality and on the other hand stream-like performance (i.e., low-latency I/O access to items and ranges of items).

We plan to investigate the main requirements and challenges, evaluate the different design choices (e.g., a standalone component vs. an extension of an existing Big Data solution like HDFS) and then propose an architectural overview.