Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

OpenStack

OpenStack is the de facto open-source management system to operate and use Cloud Computing infrastructures. Started in 2012, the OpenStack foundation gathers 500 organizations including groups such as Intel, AT&T, RedHat, etc. The software platform relies on tens of services with a 6-month development cycle. It is composed of more than 2 millions of lines of code, mainly in Python, just for the core services. While these aspects make the whole ecosystem quite swift, they are also good signs of maturity of this community. We created and animated between 2016 and 2018 the Fog/Edge/Massively Distributed (FEMDC) Special Interest Group (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Fog_Edge_Massively_Distributed_Clouds) and have been contributing to the Performance working group since 2015. The former investigates how OpenStack can address Fog/Edge Computing use cases whereas the latter addresses scalability, reactivity and high-availability challenges. In addition to releasing white papers and guidelines [100], the major result from the academic view point is the aforementioned EnOS solution, a holistic framework to conduct performance evaluations of OpenStack (control and data plane). In May 2018, the FEMDC SiG turned into a larger group under the control of the OpenStack foundation. This group gathers large companies such as Verizon, ATT, etc.

Grid'5000

Grid'5000 is a large-scale and versatile testbed for experiment-driven research in all areas of computer science, with a focus on parallel and distributed computing including Cloud, HPC and Big Data. It provides access to a large amount of resources: 12000 cores, 800 compute-nodes grouped in homogeneous clusters, and featuring various technologies (GPU, SSD, NVMe, 10G and 25G Ethernet, Infiniband, Omni-Path) and advanced monitoring and measurement features for traces collection of networking and power consumption, providing a deep understanding of experiments. It is highly reconfigurable and controllable. Researchers can experiment with a fully customized software stack thanks to bare-metal deployment features, and can isolate their experiment at the networking layer advanced monitoring and measurement features for traces collection of networking and power consumption, providing a deep understanding of experiments designed to support Open Science and reproducible research, with full traceability of infrastructure and software changes on the testbed. STACK members are strongly involved into the management and the supervision of the testbed, notably through the steering committee or the SeDuCe testbed described hereafter.

SeDuCe

The SeDuCe project aims to deliver a research testbed dedicated to holistic research studies on energetical aspects of datacenters. Part of the Grid'5000 Nantes' site, this infrastructure is composed of probes that measure the power consumption of each server, each switch and each cooling system, and also measure the temperature at the front and the back of each servers. These sensors enable reasearch to cover a full spectrum of the energetical aspect of datacenters, such as cooling and power consumption depending of experimental conditions.

The testbed should soon be connected to renewqble energy sources (solar panels). This “green” datacenter will enable researchers to perform real experiment-driven studies on fields such as temperature based scheduling or “green” aware software (i.e., software that take into account renewable energies and weather conditions).

SILECS

STACK Members are involved in the definition and bootstrap of the SILECS infrastructure (IR ministère). This infrastructure can be seen as a merge of the Grid'5000 and FIT testbeds with the goal of providing a common platform for experimental computer Science (Next Generation Internet, Internet of things, clouds, HPC, big data, ...).