Section: Other Grants and Activities

International Contracts and Projects

France-Berkeley Fund Award (2008-2009)

In the framework of the France-Berkeley Fund, we have been awarded a research grant to enable an exchange program involving both young and confirmed scientists. The project focused on massively parallel solvers for large sparse matrices and reinforced the collaboration initiated by E. Agullo when he was a member of the GRAAL team. At LIP, J.-Y. L'Excellent and B. Uçar participated to this project in 2009. On the French side, this project also involves ENSEEIHT-IRIT, LaBRI , and Cerfacs .

French-Israeli project “Multicomputing” (2009-2010)

This project aims at improving the scalability of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics calculations by the use of state-of-the-art numerical linear algebra approaches. It mainly involves Tel Aviv University and ENSEEIHT-IRIT (Toulouse), where Alfredo Buttari is coordinator for the French side. In Graal , I. Chowdhury, J.-Y. L'Excellent, and B. Uçar participate to this project.

REDIMPS (2007-2009)

REDIMPS (Research and Development of International Matrix Prediction System) is a project funded by the Strategic Japanese-French Cooperative Program on "Information and Communications Technology including Computer Science" with the CNRS and the JST. The goal of this international collaboration is building an international sparse linear equation solver expert site. Among the objectives of the project, one resides in the cooperation of the TLSE partners and the JAEA in the testing, the validation and the promotion of the TLSE system that is currently released. JAEA, who is one of the leading institute and organization of Japanese HPC, is studying high-performance numerical simulation methods on novel supercomputers, and is expecting to find the best linear solver within this collaboration. By integrating knowledge and technology of JAEA and TLSE partners, it is expected that we will achieve the construction of an international expert system for sparse linear algebra on an international grid computing environment.

Thanks to additional funding from INRIA's “explorateur” program, Y. Caniou spent one month two times at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency in Tokyo, Japan. He worked on the Aegis -Diet Grid system interoperability.

Yves Caniou, Eddy Caron, Frédéric Desprez, and Jean-Yves L'Excellent participate to this project.

CNRS-USA grant SchedLife, University of Hawai`i (2007-2009)

We have been awarded a CNRS grant in the framework of the CNRS/USA funding scheme, which runs for three years starting in 2007. The collaboration is done with the Concurrency Research Group (CoRG) of Henri Casanova, and the Bioinformatics Laboratory (BiL) of Guylaine Poisson of the Information and Computer Sciences Department, of the University of Hawai`i at Manoā, USA.

The SchedLife project targets the efficient scheduling of large-scale scientific applications on clusters and Grids. To provide context for this research, we focus on applications from the domain of bioinformatics, in particular comparative genomics and metagenomics applications, which are of interest to a large user community today. So far, applications (in bioinformatics or other fields) that have been successfully deployed at a large scale fall under the “independent task model”: they consist of a large number of tasks that do not share data and that can be executed in any order. Furthermore, many of these application deployments rely on the fact that the application data for each task is “small”, meaning that the cost of sending data over the network can be ignored in the face of long computation time. However, both previous assumptions are not valid for all applications, and in fact many crucial applications, such as the aforementioned bioinformatics applications, require computationally dependent tasks sharing very large data sets.

In our previous collaborations, we have tackled the issue of non-negligible network communication overheads and have made significant contributions. For instance, we have designed strategies that rely on the notions of steady-state scheduling (i.e., attempting to maximize the number of tasks that complete per time unit, in the long run) and/or divisible load scheduling (i.e., approximate the discrete workload that consists of individual tasks as a continuous workload). These strategies provide powerful means for rethinking the deployment and the scheduling of independent task applications when network communication can be a bottleneck. However, the target applications in this project cannot benefit from these strategies directly and will require fundamental advances. This project aims to build upon and go beyond our past collaborations, with two main research thrusts:

• Scheduling of applications with data requirements. We consider applications that require possibly multiple data files that need to be shared by multiple application tasks. These files may be extremely large (e.g., millions of genomic sequences) and may need to be updated frequently (e.g., when new sequences are identified). We must then ensure that file access is not a bottleneck.

• Scheduling of multiple concurrent applications. We also plan to study the scheduling for multiple applications, i.e., launched by different (most likely competing) users. We then aim to orchestrate computation and communication in order to have the best aggregate performance. This is a difficult problem, first in order to define a good performance metric, and then to maximize this performance metric in a tractable way.

A. Benoit, E. Caron, F. Desprez, Y. Robert and F. Vivien participate to this project.

Associated-team MetagenoGrid (2008-2010)

This associated-team involves the exact same persons, and covers the same subject, as the CNRS-USA grant SchedLife described above.

CNRS délégation of Yves Caniou (2009-2010)

Yves Caniou has obtained a CNRS delegation for the scholar year 2009-2010. He is now working at the CNRS Japan-French Laboratory in Informatics (JFLI) supervised by Philippe Codognet. The JFLI is located in Tokyo, Japan, and is composed of the Tokyo University, Université Pierre et Marie-Curie (UPMC), the Keio University, the CNRS, the NII partnership.