Section: Application Domains

Grid and Cloud Computing

As distributed systems are becoming ubiquitous, Grid computing, and the more recent concept of Cloud computing are facing a major challenge for computer science: seamless access and use of large-scale computing resources, world-wide. It is believed that by providing pervasive, dependable, consistent and inexpensive access to advanced computational capabilities, computational grids will allow new classes of applications to emerge.

There is a need for models and infrastructures for grid and peer-to-peer computing, and we promote a programming model based on communicating mobile objects and components. Another challenge is to use, for a given computation, unused CPU cycles of desktop computers in a Local Area Network. This is local or wide area Computational Peer-To-Peer, a concept that can contribute to a global energy footprint reduction. This is a challenge that also appears in more stable and homogeneous environments compared to P2P systems, such as datacenters.