Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ADEME RennesGrid

Participants : Benjamin Camus, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Martin Quinson.

The aim of the RennesGrid project is to design and implement a large-scale preindustrial microgrid demonstrator in the territory of Rennes Metropole to organize the shared self-consumption of a group of photovoltaic panels coupled to stationary storage devices. Traditional approaches to power grid management tend to overlook the costs, both energy and economic, of using computers to ensure optimal electricity network management. However, these costs can be significant. It is therefore necessary to take them into account along with the design of IT tools during studies of optimal energy management of smart grids. In addition, telecommunication networks are generally considered to have an ideal functioning, that is to say they can not negatively affect the performance of the electricity network. However, this is not realistic and it is necessary to analyze the impact of phenomena such as congestion, latency, failures related to computer equipment or impact on the batteries of sensors, etc. on strategies for optimal management of the electricity network. In this project, we will closely collaborate with Anne Blavette (CR CNRS in electrical engineering, SATIE, Rennes) and co-supervise a post-doc on evaluating the impact of the IT infrastructure in the management of smart grids.

Inria ADT SaaP (2016-2018)

Participants : Toufik Boubehziz, Martin Quinson.

The SaaP technological development action (SimGrid As A Platform) funded by Inria targets the refactoring of SimGrid to make it ready to use in production and teaching contexts. Our ultimate goal is to sustain the development of the framework by involving 5 to 10 companies that are using it internally. Our target of the teaching context is thus an intermediate goal, as we think that the best solution to ensure the adoption of our tool by the industrial engineers is that they discover the tool during their studies.

The technical actions envisioned for this ADT are the complete re-factoring of the software (to make it easier to script a new model within the tool kernel) and a reorganization of the interfaces (for a better integration in the Java and python language). This work is lead by Toufik Boubehziz in collaboration with the whole SimGrid community, which provide valuable feedback.

Inria ADT DiFFuSE (2017-2018)

Participants : Nikos Parlavantzas, Christine Morin, Manh Linh Pham.

The DiFFuSE technological development action (Distributed framework for cloud-based epidemic simulations) funded by Inria focuses on the DiFFuSE framework developed by Myriads in the context of MIHMES (2012-2017). MIHMES was a 5-year collaborative multidisciplinary project funded by ANR under the Investments for the Future Program, and led by BIOEPAR, INRA, ONIRIS. DiFFuSE is a framework that provides design support, reusable code, and tools for building and executing epidemic simulations in the cloud. The main objectives of this ADT are to improve the usability and robustness of DiFFuSE, to provide support to scientists for applying the framework to a new epidemic simulations as well as to provide a thorough evaluation of the framework using multiple case studies.

Inria IPL Discovery (2015-2019)

Participants : Ehsan Ahvar, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Matthieu Simonin, Genc Tato, Cédric Tedeschi.

The Inria IPL Discovery officially started in September 2015. It targets the design, development and deployment of a distributed Cloud infrastructure within the network's backbone. It will be based upon a set of building blocks whose design will take locality as a primary constraint, so as to minimize distant communications and consequently achieve better network traffic, partition management and improved availability.

Its developments are planned to get integrated within the OpenStack framework. Myriads is involved in the design of new overlay networks for such environments so as to support efficient messaging and routing. Myriads is also involved in the energy/cost benefit analysis of distributed edge-cloud architectures.

Inria IPL CityLab (2015-2018)

Participants : Subarna Chatterjee, Christine Morin.

The Inria Project Lab (IPL) CityLab@Inria (http://citylab.inria.fr) studies ICT solutions toward smart cities that promote both social and environmental sustainability. A strong emphasis of the Lab is on the undertaking of a multi-disciplinary research program through the integration of relevant scientific and technology studies, from sensing up to analytics and advanced applications, so as to actually enact the foreseen smart city Systems of Systems. City-scale experiments of the proposed platforms and services are planned in cities in California and France, thereby learning lessons from diverse setups.

Myriads investigates advanced cloud solutions for the Future Internet, which are critical for the processing of urban data. It leverages its experience in cloud computing and Internet of services while expanding its research activities to the design and implementation of cloud services to support crowd-Xing applications and mobile social applications.

In 2017, Christine Morin was involved in the preparation of a SPOC entitled "Technological challenges of participatory smart cities", which is proposed in the framework of the EIT Digital professional school. She prepared seven sequences on cloud-based urban data management. This SPOC is the English version of the MOOC entitled "Défis technologiques des villes intelligentes participatives" run on the FUN platform in Spring and Fall 2017.

In 2017, we also conducted a comparative experimental evaluation of data stream processing environments executed on clusters and clouds. We compared the performance and energy consumption of Heron, Storm and Flink frameworks with three data streaming representative applications.

Inria IPL Hac Specis (2016-2020)

Participants : Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Martin Quinson, The Anh Pham.

The goal of the HAC SPECIS (High-performance Application and Computers: Studying PErformance and Correctness In Simulation) project (http://hacspecis.gforge.inria.fr/) is to answer methodological needs of HPC application and runtime developers and to allow to study real HPC systems both from the correctness and performance point of view. To this end, we gather experts from the HPC, formal verification and performance evaluation community.

During his first year of PhD thesis, The Anh Pham conducted an analysis of the formal methods and algorithms used in SimGrid. This work, co-advised by Martin Quinson with Thierry Jéron (team SUMO, formal methods), was important to bridge the gap between the involved communities. The resulting work has been published in a workshop gathering the intersection between the communities of formal methods and HPC [44].

Another PhD thesis will stat in December 2017, co-advised by Laurent Lefèvre (Avalon team, Lyon), Martin Quinson and Anne-Cécile Orgerie. This thesis will focus on simulating the energy consumption of continuum computing between heterogeneous numerical infrastructures for HPC.

COSMIC PRE (2016 - 2018)

Participants : Benjamin Camus, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Martin Quinson.

The distributed nature of Cloud infrastructures involves that their components are spread across wide areas, interconnected through different networks, and powered by diverse energy sources and providers, making overall energy monitoring and optimization challenging. The COSMIC project aims at taking advantage of the opportunity brought by the Smart Grids to exploit renewable energy availability and to optimize energy management in distributed Clouds. This PRE, led by Anne-Cécile Orgerie also involves Fanny Dufossé from Dolphin team (Inria Lille), Anne Blavette from SATIE laboratory (electrical engineering, Rennes), and Benjamin Camus, who has started a 18 months post-doc in October 2016 in the context of this project. A paper on this project has been presented at SMARTGREENS 2017 and two others are currently under submission.

MIHMES ANR Investissements d'Avenir (2012 - 2017)

Participants : Christine Morin, Manh Linh Pham, Nikos Parlavantzas.

The MIMHES project (http://www.inra.fr/mihmes) led by INRA/BioEpAR aimed at producing scientific knowledge and methods for the management of endemic infectious animal diseases and veterinary public health risks. The role of Myriads was to help MIHMES researchers improve the performance of their simulation applications and take advantage of computing resources provided by clouds. To that end, Myriads developed a framework, named DiFFuSE, that provides design support, reusable code, and tools for building and executing epidemic simulations in the cloud.

In 2017, we further developed DiFFuSE and extended the framework to make use of the PaaSage open-source platform, the main outcome of a European FP7 IP project in which Myriads participated (2012-2016). Thanks to PaaSage, DiFFuSE allows deploying and managing services in multi-cloud environments. We applied DiFFuSE to restructure an application that simulates the spread of the bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) and conducted experiments to evaluate DiFFuSE [45].

SESAME ASTRID project (2016-2019)

Participants : Pascal Morillon, Christine Morin, Matthieu Simonin, Cédric Tedeschi, Mehdi Belkhiria.

The Sesame project (http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/Project-ANR-16-ASTR-0026) led by IMT Atlantique aims at develop efficient infrastructures and tools for the maritime traffic surveillance. The role of Myriads is to define a robust and scalable infrastructure for the real-time and batch processing of vessel tracking information.

PIA ELCI (2015-2018)

Participant : Anne-Cécile Orgerie.

The PIA ELCI project deals with software environment for computation-intensive applications. It is leaded by BULL. In the context of this project, we collaborate with ROMA and Avalon teams from Lyon: we co-supervise a PhD student (Issam Rais) funded by this project with these teams on multi-criteria scheduling for large-scale HPC environments. This collaboration has led to two publications in 2017: a journal article published in IJHPCA and a conference paper presented at EuroPar.

CNRS GDS EcoInfo

Participant : Anne-Cécile Orgerie.

The EcoInfo group deals with reducing environmental and societal impacts of Information and Communications Technologies from hardware to software aspects. This group aims at providing critical studies, lifecycle analyses and best practices in order to improve the energy efficiency of printers, servers, data centers, and any ICT equipment in use in public research organizations. In particular, it has led in December 2016 to the publication of an ADEME report jointly with Deloitte Développement Durable, Futuribles, CREDOC and ADEME on the potential contribution of digital to the reduction of environmental impacts: state of play and challenges for the prospective.