Author: Christian Perez

by

Exa-SofT : HPC software and tools

A NumPEx PEPR project

Though significant efforts have been devoted to the implementation and optimization of several crucial parts of a typical HPC software stack, most HPC experts agree that exascale supercomputers will raise new challenges, mostly because the trend in exascale compute-node hardware is toward heterogeneity and scalability: Compute nodes of future systems will have a combination of regular CPUs and accelerators (typically GPUs), along with a diversity of GPU architectures.

Meeting the needs of complex parallel applications and the requirements of exascale architectures raises numerous challenges which are still left unaddressed.
As a result, several parts of the software stack must evolve to better support these architectures. More importantly, the links between these parts must be strengthened to form a coherent, tightly integrated software suite.

Our project aims at consolidating the exascale software ecosystem by providing a coherent, exascale-ready software stack featuring breakthrough research advances enabled by multidisciplinary collaborations between researchers.

The main scientific challenges we intend to address are:

  • productivity,
  • performance portability,
  • heterogeneity,
  • scalability and resilience,
  • performance and energy efficiency.

AVALON is coordinating the WP1 and participates to WP1 and WP2

Project Information

  • URL: Not available yet
  • Starting date: 2023
  • End date: 2028
by

Taranis : Model, Deploy, Orchestrate, and Optimize Cloud

A PEPR Cloud project

New infrastructures, such as Edge Computing or the Cloud-Edge-IoT computing continuum, make cloud issues more complex as they add new challenges related to resource diversity and heterogeneity (from small sensor to data center/HPC, from low power network to core networks), geographical distribution, as well as increased dynamicity and security needs, all under energy consumption and regulatory constraints.

In order to efficiently exploit new infrastructures, we propose a strategy based on a significant abstraction of the application structure description to further automate application and infrastructure management. Thus, it will be possible to globally optimize the resources used with respect to multi-criteria objectives (price, deadline, performance, energy, etc.) on both the user side (applications) and the provider side (infrastructures). This abstraction also includes the challenges related to the abstraction of application reconfiguration and to automatically adapt the use of resources.

The Taranis project addresses these issues through four scientific work packages, each focusing on a phase of the application lifecycle: application and infrastructure description models, deployment and reconfiguration, orchestration, and optimization.

The first work package “Modeling” addresses the complexity of cloud-edge application and infrastructure models: formal verification and optimization of these models, multi-layer variability, the relationship between model expressiveness and efficient solution computation, lock-ins of proprietary models, and heterogeneity of cloud application and infrastructure modeling languages.

The second work package “Deployment and Reconfiguration” studies deployment and reconfiguration related issues to reduce management complexity and increase support for provisioning and configuration languages, while improving operations certification and increasing operations concurrency. The workpackage also aims to reduce the complexity of the bootstrapping problem on geo-distributed and heterogeneous resources.

The third work package “Orchestration of services and resources” aims at extending the orchestrators for the Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum, while making them more autonomous with respect to dynamic, functional and/or non-functional needs, in particular with respect to the network partitioning problem specific to Cloud-Edge-IoT infrastructures.

Finally, the fourth work package “Optimization” aims to revisit the optimization problems associated with the use of Cloud-Edge-IoT infrastructures and the execution of an application when a large number of decision variables need to be considered jointly. It also aims to make optimization techniques aware of the Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum, the heterogeneous distributed platforms and the wide range of application configurations involved.

AVALON is coordinating the project and participated to the first two workpackages.

Project Information

  • URL: Not available yet
  • Starting date: 2023, September 1st
  • End date: 2030, August 31th
by

Slices PP– Preparatory Phase

The digital infrastructures research community continues to face numerous new challenges towards the design of the Next Generation Internet. This is an extremely complex ecosystem encompassing communication, networking, data-management and data-intelligence issues, supported by established and emerging technologies such as IoT, 5/6G, cloud-to-edge computing. Coupled with the enormous amount of data generated and exchanged over the network, this calls for incremental as well as radically new design paradigms. Experimentally-driven research is becoming worldwide a de-facto standard, which has to be supported by large- scale research infrastructures to make results trusted, repeatable and accessible to the research communities.


SLICES-RI (Research Infrastructure), which was recently included in the 2021 ESFRI roadmap, aims to answer these problems by building a large infrastructure needed for the experimental research on various aspects of distributed computing, networking, IoT and 5/6G networks. It will provide the resources needed to continuously design, experiment, operate and automate the full lifecycle management of digital infrastructures, data, applications, and services.


Based on the two preceding projects within SLICES-RI, SLICES-DS (Design Study) and SLICES-SC (Starting Community), the SLICES-PP (Preparatory Phase) project will validate the requirements to engage into the implementation phase of the RI lifecycle. It will set the policies and decision processes for the governance of SLICES-RI: i.e., the legal and financial frameworks, the business model, the required human resource capacities and training programme. It will also settle the final technical architecture design for implementation. It will engage member states and stakeholders to secure commitment and funding needed for the platform to operate. It will position SLICES as an impactful instrument to support European advanced research, industrial competitiveness and societal impact in the digital era.

Project Information

by

WG Avalon 3 mai 2022

Élise Jeanneau a présenté l’exposé suivant.

Titre: SkyData, un nouveau paradigme pour la gestion de données

Résumé

Les systèmes de gestion de données traditionnels sont centrées sur les 
applications, plutôt que sur les données. Le projet SkyData propose de 
renverser la donne en gérant des données autonomes, capables de décider 
d’elles-mêmes leurs migrations et réplications. Le système qui en 
résulte est distribué, dynamique et fondamentalement différent des 
systèmes de gestion de données existants. Ce nouveau paradigme permet 
aux utilisateurs d’intégrer leurs données au système sans avoir à en 
céder le contrôle à un gestionnaire de données tier.

SkyData est un projet soumis à l’ANR. Cette présentation a pour but 
d’introduire les bases de la structure de SkyData, et de discuter 
certains usages possibles de ces données autonomes.

Pierre Jacquot: Evaluating unikernels for HPC applications

Pierre Jacqot
June 29th 2020, 14:30–15:30

Title: Evaluating unikernels for HPC applications

Abstract: Unikernels are lightweight single-application operating systems. They are designed to run as virtual machines, but some are able to run on bare metal too. They are quite popular in the system research community due to the increase of performance they can provide. By reducing the system call overhead and the OS-noise, they might be a good alternative to containers for HPC applications. This report evaluate the suitability of unikernels for HPC applications. This is done by conducting stability and performance studies with the Bots benchmarks and the Rodinias benchmarks. They are performed on multi-core architectures, on single node.

Arthur Chevalier: Optimization of software license placement in the Cloud for economical and efficient deployment

Arthur Chevalier
November 17th 2020, 14:30–15:30

Title: Optimization of software license placement in the Cloud for economical and efficient deployment

Abstract: Today, the use of software is generally regulated by licenses, whether they are free, paid for and with or without access to their sources. The world of licensing is very vast and poorly understood. Often we only know the version most widely used by the general public (a software purchase is equal to a license). The reality is much more complex, especially for large publishers. In this presentation I will present the impact and importance of managing these licenses when using software in a cloud architecture. I will show a case study to demonstrate the impact of dynamic license management and the need to propose new ways to manage and optimize software assets.

Titre: Optimisation du placement des licences logicielles dans le Cloud pour un déploiement économique et efficient

Résumé: Aujourd’hui, l’utilisation des logiciels est généralement réglementée par des licences, qu’elles soient gratuites, payantes et avec ou sans accès à leurs sources. L’univers des licences est très vaste et mal connu. Souvent on ne connaît que la version la plus répandue au grand public (un achat de logiciel est égale à une licence). La réalité est bien plus complexe surtout chez les grands éditeurs. Dans cette présentation je présenterai l’impact et l’importance de la gestion de ces licences lors de l’utilisation de logiciels dans une architecture Cloud. Je montrerai un cas d’étude pour prouver l’impact de la gestion dynamique des licences et la nécessité de proposer de nouvelles façons de gérer et optimiser un patrimoine logiciel.

by

SLICES-DS: Slices – Design Study

Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies – Design Study

Objective

Digital Infrastructures as the future Internet, constitutes the cornerstone of the digital transformation of our society. As such, Innovation in this domain represents an industrial need, a sovereignty concern and a security threat. Without Digital Infrastructure, none of the advanced services envisaged for our society is feasible. They are both highly sophisticated and diverse physical systems but at the same time, they form even more complex, evolving and massive virtual systems. Their design, deployment and operation are critical. In order to research and master Digital infrastructures, the research community needs to address significant challenges regarding their efficiency, trust, availability, reliability, range, end-to-end latency, security and privacy. Although some important work has been done on these topics, the stringent need for a scientific instrument, a test platform to support the research in this domain is an urgent concern. SLICES ambitions to provide a European-wide test-platform, providing advanced compute, storage and network components, interconnected by dedicated high-speed links. This will be the main experimental collaborative instrument for researchers at the European level, to explore and push further, the envelope of the future Internet. A strong, although fragmented expertise, exists in Europe and could be leveraged to build it. SLICES is our answer to this need. It is ambitious, practical but overall timely and necessary. The main objective of SLICES-DS is to adequately design SLICES in order to strengthen research excellence and innovation capacity of European researchers and scientists in the design and operation of Digital Infrastructures. The SLICES Design study will build upon the experience of the existing core group of partners, to prepare in details the conceptual and technical design of the new leading edge SLICES-RI for the next phases of the RI’s lifecycle.

Project Information

SKA Telescope
by

SKA Telescope

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometre (one million square metres) of collecting area. The scale of the SKA represents a huge leap forward in both engineering and research & development towards building and delivering a unique instrument, with all final reviews completed ahead of construction. The SKA Observatory is the second intergovernmental organisation dedicated to astronomy in the world, a er the European Southern Observatory. It brings together a wealth of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers to bring the project to fruition.

SKA-France is a national coordination of industrial, technical and scientific activities preparatory to the SKA project in France. It created a consortium named “Maison SKA-France” to finance France’s membership in the Project Office, to define the French scientific and technological roadmap for the
SKA, and to pursue the development of joint research projects between public and private partners targeting SKA major challenges. Inria as a member of “Maison SKA France” brings its expertise in some challenging aspects of the project such as in high performance computing, big data, resource management, I/O, and IA. Avalon coordinates this effort.

by

PRACE 6th Implementation Phase Project

Summary

Prace
PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing is the permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Systems at the highest performance level (Tier-0) are deployed by Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, providing researchers with more than 17 billion core hours of compute time. HPC experts from 25 member states enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently PRACE is finalizing the transition to PRACE 2, the successor of the initial five year period. The objectives of PRACE-6IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include: assisting the development of PRACE 2; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing and extend advanced training which so far provided more than 36 400 person·training days; preparing strategies and best practices towards Exascale computing, work on forward-looking SW solutions; coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services; and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures. A high level Service Catalogue is provided. The proven project structure will be used to achieve each of the objectives in 7 dedicated work packages. The activities are designed to increase Europe’s research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting take-up by industry and new communities and special offers to SMEs; assistance to PRACE 2 development; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies. This will be monitored through a set of KPIs.

Project Information