Inria Project Lab C2S@Exa

Computer and Computational Sciences at Exascale INRIA Large Scale Initiative

The C2S@Exa INRIA large-scale initiative is concerned with the development of numerical modeling methodologies that fully exploit the processing capabilities of modern massively parallel architectures in the context of a number of selected applications related to important scientific and technological challenges for the quality and the security of life in our society. Avalon is a core-team member, co-leading Pole 4 on Programming models.

Start Date: 2013

Duration: 4 years

Avalon Members: T. Gautier, C. Perez, J. Richard

More information on C2S@Exa website

PIA ELCI

ELCI is a French software project that brings together academic and industrial partners to design and provide a software environment for the next generation of HPC systems. The principal objective for the project is to facilitate the development of a software environment that meets the demands of the new generation of HPC architectures. This will cover the whole software stack (system and programming environments), numerical solvers and pre/post/co processing software.
ELCI is a French software project that brings together academic and industrial partners to design and provide a software environment for the next generation of HPC systems. The project is funded by the participating partners and by the French FSN “Fond pour la Société Numérique”.

The principal objective for the project is to facilitate the development of a software environment that meets the demands of the new generation of HPC architectures. This will cover the whole software stack (system and programming environments), numerical solvers and pre/post/co processing software.

A co-design approach is employed, that covers the software environment for computer architectures, the requirements of more demanding applications, and is adapted to future hardware architectures (multicore/many core processors, high-speed networks and data storage).

These developments will be validated according to their capacity to deal with the new exascale challenges- larger scalability, higher resiliency, greater security, improved modularity, with better abstraction and interactivity for application cases.

Start Date: September 2014

Duration: 3 years

Avalon Members: T. Gautier, L.Lefevre, C. Perez, I. Rais, J. Richard

More information on the ELCI web site.

LEXISTEMS

LEXISTEMS develops Xact.ai, a solution to provide an universal access to knowledge in Natual Langage (data & data’s structuration limitless).

For organizations, Xact.ai is the most effective way to monetize data assets. Whatever the nature and volume of knowledge bases.

LEXISTEMS’ solutions streamline the use and analysis of natural language in business and personal applications.
A new era is opening. Users are empowered, and organizations leverage the true value of their data assets.

LEXISTEMS and Avalon collaborate on the design and development of NLP algorithms and high-level data structuration.

 

Start Date: September 2016

Duration:

Avalon Members: Marcos Assuncao, Eddy Caron and Thomas Pellisier-Tanon

More information on website: LEXISTEMS

Inria Project Lab HAC-SPECIS

HAC SPECIS: Inria project lab on High-performance Application and Computers: Studying PErformance and Correctness In Simulation (2016-2020) :

The goal of the HAC SPECIS (High-performance Application and Computers: Studying PErformance and Correctness In Simulation) project is to answer  methodological needs of HPC application and runtime developers and to allow to study real HPC systems both from the correctness and performance point of view. To this end, we gather experts from the HPC, formal verification and performance evaluation community. website : http://hacspecis.gforge.inria.fr/

 

Start Date: June 2016

Duration: 4 years

Avalon Members: F. Suter, L. Lefevre

CeoE H2020 POP

Summary

Inaugurated October 1, 2015, the new EU H2020 Center of Excellence (CoE) for Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) provides performance optimisation and productivity services for academic and industrial codes. European’s leading experts from the High Performance Computing field will help application developers getting a precise understanding of application and system behaviour. This project is supported by the European Commission under H2020 Grant Agreement No. 676553

Established codes, but especially codes never undergone any analysis or performance tuning, may profit from the expertise of the POP services which use latest state-of-the-art tools to detect and locate bottlenecks in applications, suggest possible code improvements, and may even help by Proof-of-Concept experiments and mock-up test for customer codes on their own platforms.

Partners

Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Numerical Algorithm Group (NAG), Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH), TERATEC (TERATEC).

Project Information

Start Date: October 2015

Duration: 3 years

Avalon Members:

Online Resources

More information on http://www.pop-coe.eu

Labex PRIMES

Laboratory of Excellence on Physics, Radiobiology, Medical Imaging, and Simulation

The program Laboratory of Excellence (LabEx) aims to endow with significant means a set of research units in order to attract world-renowned researchers and to establish a high-level and integrated politic of research, training and valorization. The ambition of this program is to develop scientific originality, to favor multidisciplinary, to increase the excellence and the international visibility of the French research and to play a driving role into the training of both doctorate and master levels.

PRIMES’s (Physics, Radiobiology, Medical Imaging, and Simulation) primary objective is to develop new concepts and methods for the exploration, the diagnosis and the therapy of cancer and ageing-related pathologies. PRIMES brings together the complementary skills of 16 recognized academic and medical partners with a long-standing experience to develop state-of-the-art methods, covering all necessary fields, from basic physics, instrumentation, radiobiology, data acquisition and processing, to image reconstruction, simulations and modeling supported by supercomputing.

Duration: 2012-2019

More information on the PRIME website.

ANR MOEBUS

Multi-objective scheduling for large scale parallel systems.

The MOEBUS project focuses on the efficient execution of parallel applications submitted by various users and sharing resources in large-scale high-performance computing environments.

We propose to investigate new functionalities to add at low cost in actual large scale schedulers and programming standards, for a better use of the resources according to various objectives and criteria. We also propose to revisit the principles of existing schedulers after studying the main factors impacted by job submissions. Then, we will propose novel efficient algorithms for optimizing the schedule for unconventional objectives like energy consumption and to design provable approximation multi-objective optimization algorithms for some relevant combinations of objectives (performance, fairness, energy consumption, etc.). An important characteristic of the project is its right balance between theoretical analysis and practical implementation. The most promising ideas will lead to integration in reference systems such as SLURM and OAR as well as new features in programming standards implementations such as MPI or OpenMP. We expect MOEBUS results to impact further use of very large scale parallel platforms.

Start Date:

Duration:

Avalon Members:

More on MEBUS website

EU FP7 PaaSage

PaaSage delivers an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications.

The platform and the accompanying methodology allow model-based development, configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing Cloud infrastructures.

PaaSage delivers an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications. The platform and the accompanying methodology allow model-based development, configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing Cloud infrastructures.

Start Date:

Duration:

Avalon Members:

More on the PaaSage website.

Celtic+ Seed4C

Seed4C Secured Embedded Element for Cloud

Celtic+ Seed4C

From Security in the cloud to security of the cloud. The value proposition of secure elements to protect software execution on a personal computer or on a server is not to be demonstrated. Nowadays, the emergence of cloud computing has led to a growing number of use case scenarios where one has to deal, not with a single computer but rather with a group of connected computers. In this case the challenge is not only to secure the software running on one single machine, but rather to manage and guarantee the security of a group of computers seen as a single entity. The main idea is to evolve from a security in the cloud (with isolated point of enforcement for security, the state of the art) to security of the cloud (with cooperative point of enforcement for security( the innovation proposed by this project) This project value proposition of cooperative points of enforcement of security is proposed under the concept of Network of Secure elements (NoSES). NoSES are made of individual secure elements attached to computers, user or network appliances and possibly pre-provisioned with initial secret keys. They can establish security associations, communicate together to setup a trusted network of computers and propagate security conditions centrally defined to a group of machines. The range of use cases use cases addressed by this concept is very broad; NoSES can be used to lock the execution of software to a group of specific machines, a particular application of this pertaining to tying virtual machines execution to specific servers. NoSEs can also be used to improve the security of distributed computing, not only by making sure that only trusted nodes can take part of the computing game, but also by certifying the integrity of the results returned by each one of them. Secure elements located in user appliances (such as a mobile handset) featuring a user interface can be part of NOSE and help secure server side operations using 2 factor authentication. The project will study the impact of NoSES upon the different layers of the architecture, from hardware to service in order to define how the trust can be propagated from the lower layers to the upper ones. At the lower level, the form factor and physical interfaces of secure elements to the host will be studied as well as, the management of their life cycle. At an upper level, the definition and implementation of security and access control and privacy policies involving the secure elements will be specified, as well as the middleware solutions to interface to the corresponding functional blocks. Finally, an important part of the project will focus on specific use cases including those mentioned above, and where the use of NoSEs can provide interesting solutions. One particular aspect will address privacy and identity management

More on the SEED4C web site.

ANR SONGS

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.

Any sound study of such systems through simulations relies on the following pillars of simulation methodology: Efficient simulation kernel; Sound and validated models; Simulation analysis tools; Campaign simulation management.

For more information, please visit the project website.