Section: Overall Objectives

Objectives

The goal of the POLARIS project is to contribute to the understanding of the performance of very large scale distributed systems by applying ideas from diverse research fields and application domains. We believe that studying all these different aspects at once without restricting to specific systems is the key to push forward our understanding of such challenges and to proposing innovative solutions. This is why we intend to investigate problems arising from application domains as varied as large computing systems, wireless networks, smart grids and transportation systems.

The members of the POLARIS project cover a very wide spectrum of expertise in performance evaluation and models, distributed optimization, and analysis of HPC middleware. Specifically, POLARIS' members have worked extensively on:

Experiment design:

Experimental methodology, measuring/monitoring/tracing tools, experiment control, design of experiments, and reproducible research, especially in the context of large computing infrastructures (such as computing grids, HPC, volunteer computing and embedded systems).

Trace Analysis:

Parallel application visualization (paje, triva/viva, framesoc/ocelotl, ...), characterization of failures in large distributed systems, visualization and analysis for geographical information systems, spatio-temporal analysis of media events in RSS flows from newspapers, and others.

Modeling and Simulation:

Emulation, discrete event simulation, perfect sampling, Markov chains, Monte Carlo methods, and others.

Optimization:

Stochastic approximation, mean field limits, game theory, discrete and continuous optimization, learning and information theory.

In the rest of this document, we describe in detail our new results in the above areas.