Section: Overall Objectives

Objectives

The recent evolutions in network and computer technology, as well as their diversification, goes with a tremendous change in the use of these architectures: applications and systems can now be designed at a much larger scale than before. This scaling evolution concerns at the same time the amount of data, the number and heterogeneity of processors, the number of users, and the geographical diversity of the users.

This race towards large scale questions many assumptions underlying parallel and distributed algorithms as well as operating middleware. Today, most software tools developed for average size systems cannot be run on large scale systems without a significant degradation of their performances.

The goal of the MESCAL project-team is to design and validate efficient exploitation mechanisms (algorithms, middleware and system services) for large distributed infrastructures.

One MESCAL's target application is intensive scientific computations (with a recent focus on nano-simulations). Initially executed on large dedicated clusters (CRAY, IBM, COMPAQ), they have been recently deployed on collections of many-core architectures. MESCAL's target infrastructures are aggregations of commodity components and/or commodity clusters at metropolitan, national or international scale such as grids obtained through sharing of available resources inside autonomous computing services, lightweight grids (such as the local CIMENT Grid), clusters of intranet resources (Condor) or aggregation of Internet resources (SETI@home, XtremWeb) as well as clouds (Amazon, Google clouds).

Another application domain concerns wireless networks. We are designing algorithms and middleware for SON (Self Organizing Networks) with implementations in wireless devices and base stations.

MESCAL's methodology in order to ensure efficiency and scalability of proposed mechanisms is based on mathematical modeling and performance evaluation of the full range from target architectures, software layers to applications.