MESCAL

International Academic Projects

Quanticol European project (2013-2016) (FP7)

The main objective of the QUANTICOL project is the development of an innovative formal design framework that provides a specification language for collective adaptive systems (CAS) and a large variety of tool-supported, scalable analysis and verification techniques. These techniques will be based on the original combination of recent breakthroughs in stochastic process algebras and associated verification techniques, and mean field/continuous approximation and control theory. Such a design framework will provide scalable extensive support for the verification of developed models, and also enable and facilitate experimentation and discovery of new design patterns for emergent behaviour and control over spatially distributed CAS.

Newcom (2012-2015) (FP7-ICT)

NEWCOM# (Network of Excellence in Wireless Communications) is a project funded under the umbrella of the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission (FP7-ICT-318306). NEWCOM# pursues long-term, interdisciplinary research on the most advanced aspects of wireless communications like Finding the Ultimate Limits of Communication Networks, Opportunistic and Cooperative Communications, or Energy- and Bandwidth-Efficient Communications and Networking. Start date: Nov. 1, 2012. End date: Oct. 31, 2015.

LICIA Laboratoire International en Calcul Intensif et Informatique Ambiante

Le LICIA est un Laboratoire International Associé entre le département d'informatique de l'Université Fédérale du Rio Grande do Sul et le Lig. Il fédère les activités de recherche en informatique entre les deux sites Grenoble et Porto Alegre.

CloudShare Associated Team

The Cloudshare Associated Team is funded by INRIA between UC Berkeley and the MESCAL project-team. Members of this collaborative project focus on several challenges to achieve cloud computing over Internet hosts. They address these challenges drawing on the experience of the BOINC team at UC Berkeley 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).

JLPC Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing

The Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing is based at Illinois and includes researchers from INRIA, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, ANL and BSC. 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.

National Academic Projects

ANR GAGA (2014-2017)

GAGA is a "Young Researchers" project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) to explore the Geometric Aspects of GAmes. The GAGA teamis spread over three different locations in France (Paris, Toulouse and Grenoble), and is coordinated by Vianney Perchet, assistant professor (Ma^icirc;tre de Conférences) in the Probabilities and Random Models laboratory in Université Paris VII.

As the name suggests, our project's focus is game theory, a rapidly developing subject with growing applications in economics, social sciences, computer science, engineering, evolutionary biology, etc. As it turns out, many game theoretical topics and tools have a strong geometrical or topological flavor: the structure of a game's equilibrium set, the design of equilibrium-computing algorithms, Blackwell approachability, the geometric character of the replicator dynamics, the use of semi-algebraicity concepts in stochastic games, and many others. Accordingly, our objective is to perform a systematic study of these geometric aspects of game theory and, by so doing, to establish new links between areas that so far appeared unrelated (such as Hessian-Riemannian geometry and discrete choice theory).

ANR MARMOTE (2013-2016) (ANR MN)

The MARMOTE project aims at realizing the prototype of a software environment dedicated to modeling with Markov chains. It brings together seven partner teams, expert in markovian analysis, who will develop advanced solution algorithms and applications in different scientific domains: reliability, distributed systems, biology, physics and economics. The MARMOTE project involves researchers from Laboratories and Universities of Montpellier, Grenoble, Versailles, Paris. The permanent researchers from MESCAL involved in this project are Bruno Gaujal, Jean-Marc Vincent and Florence Perronnin.

ANR GEOMEDIA (2013-2015) (ANR Corpus)

The research project GEOMEDIA (ANR Corpus, 2013-2015) includes a collaboration between Mescal and Magma research groups. Its goal is to design an international observatory of mediatized events, based on the collection of RSS flows feeded by 100 newspapers in French and English languages. The aim of this project is (1) to describe the complexity of the information contained in RSS flows based on space, time and media dimensions; (2) to derive basic solutions for the identification of international events on the basis of time aggregation procedures; (3) to analyze the spatial interactions between countries through an analysis of co-quotations in RSS flows; (4) to check the existence of interactions between time and space dimensions.

ANR SONGS (2012-2015)

The last decade has brought tremendous changes to the characteristics of large scale distributed computing platforms. Large grids processing terabytes of information a day and the peer-to-peer technology have become common even though understanding how to efficiently such platforms still raises many challenges. As demonstrated by the USS SimGrid project funded by the ANR in 2008, simulation has proved to be a very effective approach for studying such platforms. Although even more challenging, we think the issues raised by petaflop/exaflop computers and emerging cloud infrastructures can be addressed using similar simulation methodology. The goal of the SONGS project is to extend the applicability of the SimGrid simulation framework from Grids and Peer-to-Peer systems to Clouds and High Performance Computation systems. Each type of large-scale computing system will be addressed through a set of use cases and lead by researchers recognized as experts in this area.

The SONGS project involves researchers from Laboratories and Universities of Nancy, Grenoble, Villeurbanne, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes, and Nice. The researchers from MESCAL involved in this project are Arnaud Legrand, Derrick Kondo, Jean-Marc Vincent, and Jean-François Méhaut.

ANR NETLEARN (ANR Infra)

The NETLEARN project aims to study, design and test a prototype implementation of resource allocation techniques in the context of the radio access network (RAN) and mobile CDN solutions. Especially on interference management issues for LTE-Advanced, ICIC type and Co-MP implementation solutions will be proposed, based on distributed learning algorithms. The core idea of the studied solutions is to build a portfolio of distributed learning techniques that address these problems. A method of effective orchestration of these techniques will be designed to select and apply the best technique in the context. The solutions to be developed should take into account non-stationarities and systems robustness in practice.

Industrial partners

Real-Time-At-Work

RealTimeAtWork.com is a startup from INRIA Lorraine created in December 2007. Bruno Gaujal is a founding partner and a scientific collaborator of the startup. Its main target is to provide software tools for solving real time constraints in embedded systems, particularly for superposition of periodic flows. Such flows are typical in automotive and avionics industries who are the privileged potential users of the technologies developed by RealTimeAtWork.com

CIMENT

The CIMENT project (Intensive Computing, Numerical Modeling and Technical Experiments, http://ciment.ujf-grenoble.fr/) gathers a wide scientific community involved in numerical modeling and computing (from numerical physics and chemistry to astrophysics, mechanics, bio-modeling and imaging) and the distributed computer science teams from Grenoble. Several heterogeneous distributed computing platforms were set up (from PC clusters to IBM SP or alpha workstations) each being originally dedicated to a scientific domain. More than 600 processors are available for scientific computation. The MESCAL project-team provides expert skills in high performance computing infrastructures.

Members of MESCAL involved in this project are Jean-François Méhaut and Olivier Richard.

Cluster Région

Partners: the INRIA GRAAL project-team, the LSR-IMAG and IN2P3-LAPP laboratories.

The MESCAL project-team is a member of the regional "cluster" project on computer science and applied mathematics, the focus of its participation is on handling large amount of data large scale architecture.

Alcatel Lucent-Bell Lab common Laboratory

A common laboratory between INRIA and the Alcatel Lucent-Bell Labs was created in early 2008 and consists on three research groups (ADR). MESCAL leads the ADR on self-optimizing networks (SELFNET).

The researchers involved in this project are Bruno Gaujal and Corinne Touati.