Section: Application Domains

Grid and Cloud Computing

Grid, peer-to-peer, group communication, mobile object systems, Cloud, fault tolerance, distribution, security, synchronisation

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, large-scale computing infrastructures 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 programming models based on communicating mobile and distributed objects and components that can allow to harness these infrastructures. Another challenge is to use, for a given computation, unused CPU cycles of desktop computers in a Local Area Network, or even from wide area interconnected nodes. 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 to be pregnant in more stable and homogeneous environments compared to P2P systems, such as datacenters under the problematics known as Virtual Machines consolidation.