Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Capacités: Projet “Investissement d'Avenir” (1/11/14 – 31/01/2018)

Participants : Damien Hardy, Viet Anh Nguyen, Isabelle Puaut.

The project objective is to develop a hardware and software platform based on manycore architectures, and to demonstrate the relevance of these manycore architectures (and more specifically the Kalray manycore) for several industrial applications. The Kalray MPPA manycore architecture is currently the only one able to meet the needs of embedded systems simultaneously requiring high performance, lower power consumption, and the ability to meet the requirements of critical systems (low latency I/O, deterministic processing times, and dependability).

The project partners are Kalray (lead), Airbus, Open-Wide, Safran Sagem, IS2T, Real Time at Work, Dassault Aviation, Eurocopter, MBDA, ProbaYes, IRIT, Onera, Verimag, Inria, IRISA, Tima and Armines.

Zero Power Computing Systems (ZEP): Inria Project Lab (2017–2020)

Participants : Erven Rohou, Bahram Yarahmadi.

This proposal addresses the issue of designing tiny wireless, batteryless, computing objects, harvesting energy in the environment. The energy level harvested being very low, very frequent energy shortages are expected. In order for the new system to maintain a consistent state, it will be based on a new architecture embedding non-volatile RAM (NVRAM). In order to benefit from the hardware innovations related to energy harvesting and NVRAM, software mechanisms will be designed. On the one hand, a compilation pass will compute a worst-case energy consumption. On the other hand, dedicated runtime mechanisms will allow:

1. to manage efficiently and correctly the NVRAM-based hardware architecture;

2. to use energy intelligently, by computing the worst-case energy consumption.

The ZEP project gathers four Inria teams that have a scientific background in architecture, compilation, operating systems together with the CEA Lialp and Lisan laboratories of CEA LETI & LIST [42]. The main application target is Internet of Things (IoT).

ANR Continuum (2015–2019)

Participants : Rabab Bouziane, Erven Rohou.

The CONTINUUM project aims to address the energy-efficiency challenge in future computing systems by investigating a design continuum for compute nodes, which seamlessly goes from software to technology levels via hardware architecture. Power saving opportunities exist at each of these levels, but the real measurable gains will come from the synergistic focus on all these levels as considered in this project. Then, a cross-disciplinary collaboration is promoted between computer science and microelectronics, to achieve two main breakthroughs: i) combination of state-of-the-art heterogeneous adaptive embedded multicore architectures with emerging communication and memory technologies and, ii) power-aware dynamic compilation techniques that suitably match such a platform.

Continuum started on Oct 1st 2015. Partners are LIRMM and Cortus SAS.

Hybrid SIMD architectures (2018–2019)

Participants : Sylvain Collange, Alexandre Kouyoumdjian, Erven Rohou.

The project objective is to define new parallel computer architectures that offer high parallel performance on high-regularity workloads while keeping the flexibility to run more irregular parallel workloads. inspired by both GPU and SIMD or vector architectures.

This project is funded by the French Ministry of Armed Forces (Ministère des Armées).

DGA/PEC ARMOUR (2018–2021)

Participants : Kévin Le Bon, Erven Rohou.

ARMOUR (dynAmic binaRy optiMizatiOn cyber-secURity) aims at improving the security of computing systems at the software level. Our contribution will be twofold: (1) identify vulnerabilities in existing software, and (2) develop adaptive countermeasure mechanisms against attacks. We will rely on dynamic binary rewriting (DBR) which consists in observing a program and modifying its binary representation in memory while it runs. DBR does not require the source code of the programs it manipulates, making it convenient for commercial and legacy applications. We will study the feasibility of an adaptive security agent that monitors target applications and deploys (or removes) countermeasures based on dynamic conditions. Lightweight monitoring is appropriate when the threat condition is low, heavy countermeasures will be dynamically woven into the code when an attack is detected. Vulnerability analysis will be based on advanced fuzzing. DBR makes it possible to monitor and modify deeply embedded variables, inaccessible to traditional monitoring systems, and also to detect unexpected/suspicious values taken by variables and act before the application crashes.

ARMOUR is funded by DGA (Direction Générale de l'Armement) and PEC (Pôle d'Excellence Cyber).