Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associated Teams

Cloud Computing at Home

• Title: Cloud Computing over Internet Volunteer Resources

• Inria principal investigator: Derrick Kondo

• International Partner:

  • Institution: University of California Berkeley (United States)

  • Laboratory: Space Sciences Laboratory

  • Researcher: David P.

• Duration: 2012 - 2013

• See also: http://mescal.imag.fr/membres/derrick.kondo/ea/ea.html

• Recently, a new vision of cloud computing has emerged where the complexity of an IT infrastructure is completely hidden from its users. At the same time, cloud computing platforms provide massive scalability, 99.999% reliability, and speedy performance at relatively low costs for complex applications and services. In this proposed collaboration, we investigate the use of cloud computing for large-scale and demanding applications and services over the most unreliable but also most powerful resources in the world, namely volunteered resources over the Internet. The motivation is the immense collective power of volunteer resources (evident by FOLDING@home's 3.9 PetaFLOPS system), and the relatively low cost of using such resources. We will address these challenges drawing on the experience of the BOINC team which designed and implemented BOINC (a middleware for volunteer computing that is the underlying infrastructure for SETI@home), and the MESCAL team which designed and implemented OAR (an industrial-strength resource management system that runs across France's main 5000-node Grid called Grid'5000).

Inria International Partners

• MESCAL has strong connections with both UFRGS (Porto Alegre, Brazil) and USP (Sao Paulo, Brazil). This year, Jean-François Méhaut visited both laboratories in July. The creation of the LICIA common laboratory (see next section) will make this collaboration even tighter.

• MESCAL has strong bounds with the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, within the (Joint Laboratory on Petascale Computing (see next section). Slim Bouguerra is visiting JLPC for an extended period (one year).

• MESCAL also has long lasting collaborations with University of California in Berkeley and a new one with Google. Bruno Gaujal, Derrick Kondo and Arnaud Legrand visited Berkeley in 2012.

Participation In International Programs

Africa

• SARIMA and IDASCO / LIRIMA (Cameroon)

MESCAL takes part in the SARIMA (Soutien aux Activités de Recherche Informatique et Mathématiques en Afrique http://www-direction.inria.fr/international/AFRIQUE/sarima.html ) project and more precisely with the University of Yaoundé 1. Cameroon student Blaise Yenké completed his PhD under the joint supervision of Professor Maurice Tchuenté. SARIMA also funded Adamou Hamza to prepare his Master Thesis during three months in the MESCAL project-team. SARIMA proposed J-F Méhaut to give a course on Operating System and Networks at Master Research Students. In addition, MESCAL participates in the IDASCO joint project with the University of Yaoundé 1. This is part of the international LIRIMA laboratory, whose goal to develop novel methods and tools for collecting and analyzing massive data sets from biological or environmental domains.

North America

• Google Derick Kondo has received a Google Research Award for 2011-2012 for his proposal on predicting idleness in data centers. The technical goal of the proposed work is to give probabilistic guarantees on when data centers are idle. The implication of such predictions is improved data center utilization, while reducing and amortizing monetary costs. The general goal of this award is to facilitate collaboration between Google Inc. and academic researchers. Google Inc. provides the award as an unrestricted gift without constraints on intellectual property.

• JLPC (Joint Laboratory on Petascale Computing) (with University of University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Several members of MESCAL are partners of this laboratory, and have paid several visits to Urbana-Champaign. Slim Bougherra (Mescal Postdoc) is visiting JLPC for one year, starting Jan. 2012.

South America

• LICIA. The CNRS, Inria, the Universities of Grenoble, Grenoble INP and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul have created the LICIA (laboratoire International de Calcul intensif et d'Informatique Ambiante). On the French side, the laboratory is co-directed by Yves Denneulin and Jean-Marc Vincent.

  The main themes are artificial intelligence, high performance computing, information representation, interfaces and visualization as well as distributed systems.

  More information can be found on http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/licia/ .