Section: New Results

Experimentation, Emulation, Reproducible Research

This section covers our work on experimentation on testbeds (mainly Grid'5000), on emulation (mainly on Distem), and on Reproducible Research.

Grid'5000 design and evolutions

Participants : Jérémie Gaidamour, Arthur Garnier, Lucas Nussbaum [contact] , Clément Parisot, Florent Didier.

The team was again heavily involved in the evolutions and the governance of the Grid'5000 testbed.

First, we finished the installation and setup of several new clusters in the Nancy site, which brought several new local users, from various teams, to the testbed.

In the context of ADT LAPLACE, Jérémie Gaidamour added support for the control of CPU parameters such as Hyperthreading, Turboboost, P-states and C-states. It is expected that this work will enable interesting usages in the areas of HPC runtimes and energy-aware computing.

Finally, in the context of his roles in the bureau, comité d'architectes and comité des responsables de sites of Grid'5000, Lucas Nussbaum managed the purchase of the new clusters at Nancy mentioned above, and gave several presentations about the testbed, at the Grid'5000 School [5] [38], at a GENI-FIRE collaboration workshop [9], [8], [6], [7].

Emulation with Distem

Participants : Emmanuel Jeanvoine, Lucas Nussbaum [contact] , Cristian Ruiz.

Several improvements have been made around Distem, mostly in the context of ADT COSETTE.

A paper demonstrating the use of Distem to evaluate fault tolerance and load balancing strategies implemented in Charm++ was accepted at CCGrid'2016 [28].

We continued our work on using Distem to experiment on NDN infrastructures. We obtained promising results, especially in terms of scale. This work is still pending publication.

Finally, we also evaluated the porting of Distem to other testbeds (ChameleonCloud and CloudLab), which was interesting for Distem specifically, but also to understand differences between those testbeds [43].

Management of experiments

Participants : Tomasz Buchert, Emmanuel Jeanvoine, Lucas Nussbaum [contact] , Cristian Ruiz.

We continued work on Ruby-Cute, a library that aggregates various useful functionality in the context of such tools. Several releases were made in 2016. We hope that it will be useful as a basis for future tools, and ease testing of new ideas in that field. The library is available on http://ruby-cute.github.io/.

Tomasz Buchert defended his PhD thesis, entitled Managing large-scale, distributed systems research experiments with control-flows, in January 2016 [1].

Experimentation methodologies on Big Data

Participants : Abdulqawi Saif, Lucas Nussbaum [contact] , Ye-Qiong Song [contact] .

Abdulqawi Saif started his PhD on experimentation methodologies for Big Data at the end of 2015. His first work [35] is a multi-criteria analysis of NFS performance using statistical Design of Experiments techniques.