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Section: New Results

Experimenting with Clouds

Simulation

Participants : Martin Quinson, Loic Guegan, Toufik Boubehziz, The Anh Pham.

We propose to combine two complementary experimental approaches: direct execution on testbeds such as Grid'5000, that are eminently believable but rather labor intensive, and simulations (using e.g. SimGrid) that are much more light-weighted, but requires are careful assessment. One specificity of the Myriads team is that we are working on these experimental methodologies per se, raising the standards of good experiments in our community. The Grid'5000 operational team is embedded in our research team, ensuring that our work remains aligned with the ground reality.

In 2017, our work was mostly centered on letting SimGrid become a de facto standard for the simulation of distributed platforms. We introduced a new programming interface, particularly adapted to the study of abstract algorithms. Beyond the engineering task, this requires to carefully capture the concepts that are important to the practitioners on distributed systems.

SimGrid is not limited to abstract algorithms, and can also be used to simulate real applications. This year, we published a journal article on the many challenges to overcome when designing a simulator of high performance systems. This work was published in the TPDS journal [20].

On the modeling side, our team worked this year toward the improvement of energy models, both for computational facilities and for the network. Despite the scarce availability of real testbeds that allow fine-grained energy measurements, we managed to provide a generic energy consumption model, published in [35], [43].

Finally, we restarted our efforts toward the formal verification of distributed systems. The model-checker that is integrated within SimGrid is already functional ([44]), but more work is necessary to make it efficient. We even found cases for which our reduction algorithm may miss defects in the verified system. This work will certainly motivate much more work in the future years.

Use cases

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

Simulation framework for studying between-herd pathogen spread in a region

In the context of the MIHMES project (2012-2017) and in collaboration with INRA researchers, we transformed a legacy application for simulating the spread of bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) to a cloud-enabled application based on the DiFFuSE framework (Distributed framework for cloud-based epidemic simulations). Specifically, the original sequential code was first modified to add single-computer parallelism using OpenMP. We then decomposed the code into separate services that were deployed across multiple clouds and independently scaled. Using this service-based cloud-enabled simulation, we performed a set of experiments that demonstrated that applying DiFFuSE increases performance, allows exploring different cost-performance trade-offs, automatically handles failures, and supports elastic allocation of resources from multiple clouds [45].

FluxNet and AmeriFlux Data Analysis

The carbon flux datasets from AmeriFlux (Americas) and FLUXNET (global) are comprised of long-term time series data and other measurements at each tower site. There are over 800 flux towers around the world collecting this data. The non-time series measurements include information critical to performing analysis on the site's data. Examples include: canopy height, species distribution, soil properties, leaf area, instrument heights, etc. These measurements are reported as a variable group where the value plus information such as method of measurement and other information are reported together. Each variable group has a different number and type of parameters that are reported. The current output format is a normalized file. Users have found this file difficult to use.

Our earlier work in the DALHIS Inria associate team focused on building user interfaces to specify the data. This year we jointly worked on developing a Jupyter Notebook that would serve as a tool for users to read in and explore the data in a personalized tutorial type environment. We developed two notebooks and the next step is to start user testing on the notebooks.