Section: Other Grants and Activities

European Projects

MCITN SCALUS: “Scaling by means of ubiquitous storage”

Participants : Adrien Lèbre, Mario Südholt.

The vision of the SCALUS Marie Curie international training network (MC ITN) is to deliver the foundation for ubiquitous storage systems, which can be scaled with respect to multiple characteristics (capacity, performance, distance, security, ...).

Providing ubiquitous storage will become a major demand for future IT systems and leadership in this area can have significant impact on European competitiveness in IT technology. To get this leadership, it is necessary to invest into storage education and research and to bridge the current gap between local storage, cluster storage, grid storage, and cloud storage. The consortium will proceed into the direction by building the first interdisciplinary teaching and research network on storage issues. It consists of top European institutes and companies in storage and cluster technology, building a demanding but rewarding interdisciplinary environment for young researchers.

The network involves the following partners: University of Paderborn (Germany, coordinator), Barcelona Super Computing (Spain), University of Durham (England), University of Frankfurt (Germany), ICS-FORTH (Greece), Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid (Spain), EMNantes/ARMINES (France), INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique (France), XLAB (Slovenia), University of Hamburg (Germany), Fujistu Technology Systems (Germany).

The overall funding of the project by the European Union is closed to 3,3 MEUR. ASCOLA's share amounts to 200 KEUR.

STREP AMPLE: “Aspect-Oriented, Model-Driven Product Line Engineering”

Participants : Jean-Claude Royer, Nicolas Anquetil, Hugo Arboleda, Jacques Noyé, Angel Núñez, Mario Südholt.

The AMPLE project started in October 2006 and finished in November 2009. It involved the following partners: Lancaster University (United-Kingdom), Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), ARMINES/EMNantes (France), Technische Universitat Darmstadt (Germany), Universiteit Twente (The Netherlands), Universidad de Málaga (Spain), HOLOS (Portugal), SAP AG (Germany), Siemens AG (Germany). As part of this project, the partners have developed a Software Product Line (SPL) development methodology offering improved modularization of variations, their holistic treatment across the software life cycle and maintenance of their traceability (forward and backward) during SPL evolution. It is based on the premises that:

• Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) can improve the way in which software is modularised, localising its variability in independent aspects as well as improving the definition of complex configuration logic to customise SPLs.

• Model-Driven Development (MDD) can help expressing concerns as a set of models without technical details and support traceability of the high-level requirements and variations through model transformations.

During this third and final year of the project, we have finalized a first version of ECaesarJ, a language supporting the alignment of software product line features and their implementation (see Sec.  5.2 ) and considered its use in the context of building automation and customer relationship management with case studies provided by the industrial partners of the project.

We also investigated principles and tool support to manage traceability for software product lines. Four orthogonal dimensions and a general traceability metamodel were proposed. We implemented some tools to enrich the basic AMPLE traceability support, they are available at http://www.emn.fr/x-info/jroyer/AMPLE/index.html . More details can be found on the project's web page: http://www.ample-project.net .

The overall funding of the project by the European Union was 3.78 MEUR. ASCOLA's share amounted to 370 KEUR.

COST IC0804

Participant : Jean-Marc Menaud.

The COST IC0840 Action (Energy efficiency in large scale distributed systems) will propose realistic energy-efficient alternate solutions to share IT distributed resources. As large scale distributed systems gather and share more and more computing nodes and storage resources, their energy consumption is drastically increasing. While much effort is nowadays put into hardware specific solutions to lower energy consumptions, the need for a complementary approach is necessary at the distributed system level, i.e. middleware, networks and applications. The action will characterize the energy consumption and energy efficiencies of distributed applications. Web site:  http://www.cost804.org/