Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

CESSA: Compositional Evolution of Secure Services with Aspects (ANR/ARPEGE)

Participants : Mario Südholt <coordinator>, Hervé Grall, Diana Allam, Rémi Douence, Jean-Claude Royer.

The project CESSA is an (industrial) ANR project running for 36 months. It was accepted in Jun. 2009 for funding amounting to 290 KEUR for ASCOLA from Dec. 2009 on. Three other partners collaborate within the project that is coordinated by ASCOLA: a security research team from Eurecom, Sophia-Antipolis, the Security and Trust team from SAP Labs, also located at Sophia-Antipolis, and IS2T, an innovative start-up company developing middleware technologies located at Nantes. The project deals with security in service-oriented architectures.

This year our group has contributed several scientific publications as part of the project. All partners have been involved in the publication of two surveys on models for service-oriented architectures and security properties. Furthermore, they have set up a blog for SAP's worldwide developper community.

All information is available from the CESSA web site: http://cessa.gforge.inria.fr .

Cool-IT (FUI)

Participant : Jean-Marc Menaud.

The Cool-IT project is an (industrial) FUI project running for 24 months. It was accepted in Sept. 2010 for funding amounting to 130 KEUR (ASCOLA only).

The objective of this project is to design systems adapted to new standards of “Green IT” to reduce the electrical consumption of data centers.

To this end, the COOL IT project develops processes for cooling computer servers, optimizes the servers power chain supply, implements tools and methods for collecting energy data in real time, and specifies methods for controlling the data centers consumption as a tradeoff between the computational power needed, its availability, and its energy consumption.

Entropy (ANR/Emergence)

Participant : Jean-Marc Menaud.

The Entropy project is an (industrial) ANR/Emergence project running for 18 months. It was accepted in Dec. 2010 for funding amounting to 242 KEUR (ASCOLA only).

The objective of this project is to conduct studies on economic feasibility (market, status, intellectual property, website) for creating an industrial business based on the Entropy software.

Some task must complete the Entropy core solution with a graphical unit interface to produce convincing demonstrators and consolidate our actual and future results. At the end of the project, the goal is to create a company whose objective is to sell the service, support and software building blocks developed by this ANR Emergence project.

MyCloud (ANR/ARPEGE)

Participants : Thomas Ledoux <coordinator>, Jean-Marc Menaud, Yousri Kouki, Frederico Alvares.

The MyCloud project is an ANR/ARPEGE project running for 42 months, starting in Nov. 2010. It was accepted in Jul. 2010 for funding amounting to 190 KEUR (ASCOLA only). MyCloud involves a consortium with three academic partners (INRIA, LIP6, EMN) and one industrial partner (We Are Cloud).

Cloud Computing is a paradigm for enabling remote, on-demand access to a set of configurable computing resources. However, the ad-hoc management of a cloud in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreement (SLA) poses significant challenges to the performance, availability, energy consumption and economical costs of the cloud.

The objective of MyCloud (http://mycloud.inrialpes.fr ) is to define and implement a novel cloud model: SLAaaS (SLA as a Service). The SLAaaS model enriches the general paradigm of Cloud Computing and enables systematic and transparent integration of SLA to the cloud. From the cloud provider's point of view, MyCloud proposes autonomic SLA management to handle performance, availability, energy and cost issues in the cloud. From the cloud customer's point of view, MyCloud provides SLA governance allowing cloud customers to be part of the loop and to be automatically notified about the state of the cloud, such as SLA violation and cloud energy consumption.

This year, the ASCOLA project-team has proposed the global architecture and framework for the SLAaaS model and has provided a solution for self-optimisation of the energy footprint in cloud infrastructures [22] .

SelfXL (ANR/ARPEGE)

Participant : Jean-Marc Menaud.

The SelfXL project is an (industrial) ANR/ARPEGE project running for 36 months. It was accepted in Jul. 2008 for funding amounting to 315 KEUR (ASCOLA only) from Jan. 2009 on.

The SelfXL project aims at investigating abstractions and implementation techniques (language mechanisms, runtime structures...) for complex and large-scale autonomic systems. The scope of this project encompasses any system that has a high software complexity (distributed, size of code etc.) and is large-scale in terms of size and heterogeneity of resources and software. Systems to be targeted range from cluster computing to embedded systems, including legacy software.

Two main issues will be addressed by SelfXL: How to implement administration policies for complex system and how to coordinate administration policies in a complex system? Regarding the first issue, SelfXL proposes to explore the DSL programming approach, i.e., designing specific languages for defining specific kinds of administration policies (self-repair, self-optimization, self-protection). The general use of DSLs would ensure the correctness of the policies.

We propose to design a decision module based on Constraints Programming (CP). As the Rules Based Systems (RBS) or the Event Condition Action (ECA) approach, CP belongs to the declarative paradigm but does not share the major drawback of the other approaches when some rules are simultaneously asserted. This is the case when there is an overlap between the domain or the target of rules.

Finally, we propose to extend the Jasmine autonomic administration platform (http://wiki.jasmine.objectweb.org ) for supporting a decentralized and hierarchical infrastructure to address the large-scale administration.