Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Labs

In 2014, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Inria, the French national computer science institute, Argonne National Laboratory, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and Jülich Supercomputing Centre formed the Joint Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing (JLESC), a follow-up of the Inria-Illinois Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing. The Joint Laboratory is based at Illinois and includes researchers from Inria, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, ANL, BSC, and JSC. It focuses on software challenges found in extreme scale high-performance computers.

Research areas include:

• Scientific applications (big compute and big data) that are the drivers of the research in the other topics of the joint-laboratory.

• Modeling and optimizing numerical libraries, which are at the heart of many scientific applications.

• Novel programming models and runtime systems, which allow scientific applications to be updated or reimagined to take full advantage of extreme-scale supercomputers.

• Resilience and Fault-tolerance research, which reduces the negative impact when processors, disk drives, or memory fail in supercomputers that have tens or hundreds of thousands of those components.

• I/O and visualization, which are important part of parallel execution for numerical silulations and data analytics

• HPC Clouds, that may execute a portion of the HPC workload in the near future.

Several members of the ROMA team are involved in the JLESC joint lab through their research on resilience. Yves Robert is the scientific representant of Inria in JLESC.

Inria Associate Teams

The Aloha associate-team is a joint project of the Roma team and of the Information and Computer science Department of the University of Hawai`i (UH) at Mānoa, Honolulu, USA. Building on a vast array of theoretical techniques and expertise developed in the field of parallel and distributed computing, and more particularly application scheduling, we tackle database questions from a fresh perspective. To this end, this proposal includes:

• a group that specializes in database systems research and who has both industrial and academic experience, the group of Lipyeow Lim (UH);

• a group that specializes in practical aspects of scheduling problems and in simulation for emerging platforms and applications, and who has a long experience of multidisciplinary research, the group of Henri Casanova (UH);

• a group that specializes in the theoretical aspects of scheduling problems and resource management (the Roma team).

The research work focuses on the following three thrusts:

1. Online, multi-criteria query optimization

2. Fault-Tolerance for distributed databases

3. Query scheduling for distributed databases