Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ADEME RennesGrid

Participants : Anne Blavette, 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 closely collaborate with Anne Blavette (CR CNRS in electrical engineering, SATIE, Rennes) and co-supervise the post-doc of Benjamin Camus who started in April 2018 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 were 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 two 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 second year of PhD thesis, The Anh Pham proposed a new algorithm to mitigate the state space explosion problem, using event folding structures to efficiently compute how to not explore equivalent execution traces more than once. 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 work will be submitted in the near future.

During her first year of PhD thesis, Dorra Boughzala studied the energy consumption of GPU and the simulation tools of the literature related to this aspect. Her work is co-advised by Laurent Lefèvre (Avalon team, Lyon), Martin Quinson and Anne-Cécile Orgerie.

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 Datamove team (Inria Grenoble), Anne Blavette from SATIE laboratory (electrical engineering, Rennes), and Benjamin Camus, who finished a 18 months post-doc in March 2018 in the context of this project. Several paper on this project have been presented this year: ACM SIGSIM PADS 2018 [16], SBAC-PAD 2018 [15], IEEE Cluster 2018 [14], IEEE PES ISGT 2018 [37], and one book chapter [38].

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.

In 2018, we investigated the dynamic, decentralized scaling of stream processing applications. Also, we collaborated with the Inria OBELIX team to scale and deploy a machine learning application they developed to build a model of a normal vessel trajectory.

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 on multi-criteria scheduling for large-scale HPC environments. Issam successfully defended his PhD in September 2018. This collaboration has led to two publications in 2017: two journal articles published in IJHPCA [3] and CCPE [11] and two conference papers presented at HPCS [26] and ICA3PP [27].

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.