Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 Projects

Gossple

Participants : Mohammad Alaggan, Antoine Boutet, Davide Frey, Arnaud Jegou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Konstantinos Kloudas, Afshin Moin, Heverson Ribeiro, François Taiani.

• Title: Gossple

• Type: IDEAS

• Instrument: ERC Starting Grant (Starting)

• Duration: September 2008 - August 2013

• Coordinator: INRIA (France)

• See also: http://www.gossple.fr

• Abstract: Anne-Marie Kermarrec is the principal investigator of the GOSSPLE ERC starting Grant (Sept. 2008 - Sept. 2013). Gossple aims at providing a radically new approach to navigating the digital information universe. This project has been granted a 1.250.000 euros budget for 5 years.

  Gossple aims at radically changing the navigation on the Internet by placing users affinities and preferences at the heart of the search process. Complementing traditional search engines, Gossple will turn search requests into live data to seek the information where it ultimately is: at the user. Gossple precisely aims at providing a fully decentralized system, auto-organizing, able to discover, capture and leverage the affinities between users and data.

Collaborations in European Programs, except FP7

Transform Marie Curie Initial Training Network

Participants : Tyler Crain, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Achour Mostefaoui, Michel Raynal.

• Program: Marie Curie Initial Training Network

• Project acronym: Transform

• Project title: Theoretical Foundations of Transactional Memory

• Duration: May 2010 - October 2013

• Coordinator: Michel Raynal - Panagiota Fatourou

• Other partners: Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas ICS FORTH Greece, University of Rennes 1 UR1 France, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne EPFL Switzerland, Technische Universitaet Berlin TUB Germany, and Israel Institute of Technology Technion.

• Abstract:

  Transform is a Marie Curie Initial Training Networks European project devoted to the Theoretical Foundations of Transactional Memory (Grant agreement no.: 238639 Date of approval of Annex I by Commission: May 26, 2009). It involves the following universities : Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas ICS FORTH Greece, University of Rennes 1 UR1 France, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne EPFL Switzerland, Technische Universitaet Berlin TUB Germany, and Israel Institute of Technology Technion.

  Major chip manufacturers have shifted their focus from trying to speed up individual processors into putting several processors on the same chip. They are now talking about potentially doubling efficiency on a 2x core, quadrupling on a 4x core and so forth. Yet multi-core is useless without concurrent programming. The constructors are now calling for a new software revolution: the concurrency revolution. This might look at first glance surprising for concurrency is almost as old as computing and tons of concurrent programming models and languages were invented. In fact, what the revolution is about is way more than concurrency alone: it is about concurrency for the masses. The current parallel programming approach of employing locks is widely considered to be too difficult for any but a few experts. Therefore, a new paradigm of concurrent programming is needed to take advantage of the new regime of multicore computers. Transactional Memory (TM) is a new programming paradigm which is considered by most researchers as the future of parallel programming. Not surprisingly, a lot of work is being devoted to the implementation of TM systems, in hardware or solely in software. What might be surprising is the little effort devoted so far to devising a sound theoretical framework to reason about the TM abstraction. To understand properly TM systems, as well as be able to assess them and improve them, a rigorous theoretical study of the approach, its challenges and its benefits is badly needed. This is the challenging research goal undertaken by this MC-ITN. Our goal through this project is to gather leading researchers in the field of concurrent computing over Europe, and combine our efforts in order to define what might become the modern theory of concurrent computing. We aim at training a set of Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in this direction and hope that, in turn, these ESRs will help Europe become a leader in concurrent computing. Its keywords are Transactional Memory, Parallelization Mechanisms, Parallel Programming Abstractions, Theory, Algorithms, Technological Sciences

Major European Organizations with which Asap has followed Collaborations

• Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne EPFL Switzerland

• collaboration on Gossple ERC, Transform

• Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas ICS FORTH Greece

• Transform

• Technische Universitaet Berlin TUB Germany

• Transform

• Lancaster University

• Gossple