Section: Other Grants and Activities

International Initiatives

Europe

ESPON :

The MESCAL project-team participates to the ESPON (European Spatial Planning Observation Network) http://www.espon.lu/ It is involved in the action 3.1 on tools for analysis of socio-economical data. This work is done in the consortium hypercarte including the laboratories LSR-IMAG (UMR 5526), Géographie-cité (UMR 8504) and RIATE (UMS 2414). The Hyperatlas tools have been applied to the European context in order to study spatial deviation indexes on demographic and sociological data at nuts 3 level.

Africa

Cameroon :

MESCAL takes part in the SARIMA(Soutien aux Activités de Recherche Informatique et Mathématiques en Afrique http://www-direction.inria.fr/international/AFRIQUE/sarima.html ) project and more precisely with the University of Yaoundé 1. Cameroon student Blaise Yenké completed his PhD under the joint supervision of Professor Maurice Tchuenté. SARIMA also funded Adamou Hamza to prepare his Master Thesis during three months in the MESCAL project-team. SARIMA proposed J-F Méhaut to give a course on Operating System and Networks at Master Research Students. In addition, MESCAL participates in the IDASCO joint project with the University of Yaoundé 1. This is part of the international LIRIMA laboratory, whose goal to develop novel methods and tools for collecting and analyzing massive data sets from biological or environmental domains.

North America

CloudComputing@home (2009-2011) is an Associate Team funded by INRIA between UC Berkeley and the MESCAL project-team. Members of this collaborative project focus on several challenges to achieve cloud computing over Internet hosts. They address these challenges drawing on the experience of the BOINC team at UC Berkeley which designed and implemented BOINC (a middleware for volunteer computing that is the underlying infrastructure for SETI@home), and the MESCAL team which designed and implemented OAR (an industrial-strength resource management system that runs across France's main 5000-node Grid called Grid'5000). This year Bahman Javadi and Derrick Kondo visited UC Berkeley for 2 weeks. Jeremy Cowles from UC Berkeley visited Grenoble for 1 week.

South America

• DIODE-A (2009-2011) Associate Team funded by INRIA with the MOAIS project-team of INRIA, and the Brazilian University UFRGS. The goal of this project is to design and develop programming tools for grid and clusters for virtual reality. This collaboration was initiated 10 years ago, and has greatly affected the activities (doctoral, publications and joint production software) of the Apache project-team, from which MOAIS and MESCAL were formed. In particular, four PhD Brazilian students have joined the MESCAL project-team as a result of this long-standing collaboration. This year, 3 members of the MESCAL project-team visited Brazil (Jean-François Méhaut, Bridgette Plateau, Jean-Marc Vincent) to enhance the existing collaborations and to form new ones.

• ECOS grant (2007-2009) Colombia: joint project with the universities of Los Andes, Bogota, and UIS, Bucaramanga, on the topic of grids for computation and data management.

Pacific and South Asia

Corinne Touati is the INPG correspondent for student exchanges with Japan and has visited many Japanese universities to ease these exchanges.