Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ADEME RennesGrid (2017-2020)

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 Mc SimGrid (2019-2021)

Participants : Ehsan Azimi, Martin Quinson.

The Mc SimGrid technological development action funded by Inria targets the refactoring of model checker that is integrated to the SimGrid simulation framework. Its software quality should be improved to be on par with the rest of the SimGrid framework. Our ultimate goal is to make this model-checker usable in production, both to assess real-size applications and as a workbench for the researchers designing new techniques and algorithms for the verification of distributed asynchronous applications and algorithms.

The technical actions envisioned for this ADT are the complete re-factoring of this software module, and the exposure of a sensible python interface to experiment with new exploration algorithms. This work is lead by Ehsan Azimi, in collaboration with Thierry Jéron from the Sumo team.

Inria IPL Discovery (2015-2019)

Participants : 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 Hac Specis (2016-2020)

Participants : Dorra Boughzala, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, The Anh Pham, Martin Quinson.

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.

The Anh Pham defended his thesis on December 6., on techniques to mitigate the state space explosion while verifying asynchronous distributed applications. He proposed a new algorithm to mitigate the state space explosion problem (published this year [19]), 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.

During her 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.

SESAME ASTRID project (2016-2019)

Participants : Mehdi Belkhiria, Pascal Morillon, Christine Morin, Matthieu Simonin, Cédric Tedeschi.

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 2019, we focused on autoscaling and placement for Stream Processing applications.

In 2019, 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.

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.