Section: Other Grants and Activities
European intiatives
SCALUS: Marie-Curie Initial Training Network (FP7)
Participants : Gabriel Antoniu, Luc Bougé, Bogdan Nicolae, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Diana Moise, Viet-Trung Tran.
The consortium of the SCALUS Marie-Curie Initial Training Network (MCITN) project aims at elevating education, research, and development inside the area of large-scale, distributed ubiquitous storage with a focus on cluster, grid, and cloud storage. The vision of this MCITN is to deliver the foundation for ubiquitous storage systems, which can be scaled in arbitrary directions (capacity, performance, distance, security, . . .). The consortium's goal is to build 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. This interdisciplinary research consortium is the foundation for young researchers to be able to perform the innovative research tasks outlined in this proposal. The academic partners include Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique , Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Paderborn, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Durham University, FORTH, École des Mines de Nantes, XLAB, CERN, NEC, Microsoft Research, Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems. The project has started on December 1st, 2009, for 4 years. It involves the KerData and Myriads teams. Gabriel Antoniu serves as a coordinator for Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique .
GridDataViz: CNRS-Romanian Science Academy Cooperation Programme
Participants : Gabriel Antoniu, Bogdan Nicolae, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Diana Moise.
This is a bilateral contract with the Distributed Systems and Grids Group lead by Nicolae Tapus and Valentin Cristea at “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Romania. This project was accepted in the framework of a call for projects jointly issued by the French CNRS and by the Romanian Academy of Science for Period January 2008 – December 2009. It focused on visualization and remote control of distributed grid data sharing platforms based on P2P techniques. This project is part of a larger collaboration between the KerData team and “Politehnica” University of Bucharest.
In 2009, a PhD student from PUB was hosted by the KerData Team: Alexandru Costan (one month, funded by the bilateral CNRS-Romanian Academy project). Additionally, an MS student from PUB was hosted this year for 5 months for her Master research project : Mihaela Vlad (co-funded by Inria 's Internships programme and by the University Rennes 1 , see above). This project led to a preliminary definition of an introspection layer for the BlobSeer data-management service based on the MonALISA distributed monitoring framework, see [13] . It serves as a starting point for the proposal of an Inria Associate Team to start in January 2010.
GridRand: Bilateral PHC contract with the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Participants : Gabriel Antoniu, Bogdan Nicolae.
GridRand is joint PHC project of Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It is an interdisciplinary research project, of both theoretical and practical nature, situated at the confluence of two main research areas: the first area is Generation and Testing of Random Number Sequences (RNS), a well-established research area. It started by Shannon's seminal work on information theory and followed by contributions from Von Neumann, Knuth, Kolmogorov, and many others, with applications in areas like digital and quantum cryptography or Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo methods. The second area is grid computing. Our goal is to address the following question: how to generate, test and manage large random sequences efficiently, by making good use of the resources offered by the Grid infrastructure and technologies?
In 2009, Bogdan Nicolae made two one-week visits at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and the Romanian partners visited the KerData Team for one week. Benjamin Girault, student at Ens Cachan was hosted by the KerData Team during its Magistère Research Intership, June-July 2009 and worked on this project.
