Today’s emergence of Petascale architectures and evolutions of both research grids and computational grids increase a lot the number of potential resources. However, existing infrastructures and access rules do not allow to fully take advantage of these resources.

One key idea of the SPADES project is to propose a non-intrusive but highly dynamic environment able to take advantages to available resources without disturbing their native use. In other words, the SPADES vision is to adapt the desktop grid paradigm by replacing users at the edge of the Internet by volatile resources. These volatile resources are in fact submitted via batch schedulers to reservation mechanisms which are limited in time or susceptible to preemption (best-effort mode).

One of the priorities of SPADES is to support platforms at a very large scale. Petascale environments are in consequence particularly considered. Nevertheless, these next-generation architectures still suffer from a lack of expertise for an accurate and relevant use.

One of the SPADES goal is to show how to take advantage of the power of such architectures. Another challenge of SPADES is to provide a software solution for a service discovery system able to face a highly dynamic platform. This system will be deployed over volatile nodes and thus must tolerate « failures ». The implementation of such an experimental development leads to the need for an interface with batch submission systems able to make reservations in a transparent manner for users, but also to be able to communicate with these batch systems in order to get the information required by our schedulers.

SPADES will propose solutions for the management of distributed schedulers in Desktop Computing environments, coping with a co-scheduling framework.

More information on SPADES website: SPADES

Computer Science differs from other experimental sciences, such as biology of physics, in the way experimental results are presented in articles. In those other disciplines articles always begin with a detailed presentation of the methods employed to produce the results that often rely on previously described and acknowledged procedures. In computer science, and more particularly in the field of application simulation, only a short description of a (sometime unavailable) ad-hoc simulation framework is provided. This prevents reproducibility of published results and thus objective comparisons between new research results and the state of the art. To reduce this gap between computer science and other experimental sciences, there is need for powerful, validated, available and well advertised tools and methods. The general goal of this project is to provide such an application simulation framework that meets the needs of both the High Performance Computing and the Large Scale Distributed Computing communities. SimGrid is recognized inthe HPC community as one of the most prominent simulation environments as shown by its large community of users and the number of publications that use it. This project will allow to extend SimGrid to target the Large Scale Distributed Computing community, increase simulation realism, and provide useful tools for test campaign management.

More information on USS Simgrid website: USS Simgrid