Section: Other Grants and Activities

National initiatives

PROSE - (2009–2011)

Members:

THOMSON, INRIA (Regal), EURECOM, PLAYADZ, LIAFA

Funding:

PROSE project is funded by ANR VERSO

Objectives:

Content Shared Through Peer-to-Peer Recommendation & Opportunistic Social Environment

The Prose project is a collective effort to design opportunistic contact sharing schemes, and characterizes the environmental conditions as well as algorithmic and architecture principles that let them operate. The partners of the Prose project will engage in this exploration through various expertise: network measurement, system design, behavioral study, analysis of distributed algorithms, theory of dynamic graph, networking modeling, and performance evaluation.

The principal investigators for Regal are Sébastien Monnet and Marc Shapiro. It involves a grant of 152 000 euros from ANR to INRIA over three years.

ABL - (2009–2011)

Members:

Gilles Muller, Gaël Thomas

Funding:

ANR Blanc

Objectives:

The goal of the “A Bug's Life” (ABL) project is to develop a comprehensive solution to the problem of finding bugs in API usage in open source infrastructure software. The ABL project has grown out of our experience in using the Coccinelle code matching and transformation tool, which we have developed as part of the former ANR project Blanc Coccinelle, and our interactions with the Linux community. Coccinelle targets the problem of documenting and automating collateral evolutions in C code, specifically Linux code. A collateral evolution is a change that is needed in the clients of an API when the API changes in some way that affects its interface. Coccinelle provides a language for expressing collateral evolutions by means of Semantic Patches, and a transformation tool for performing them automatically. We have used Coccinelle to reproduce over 60 collateral evolutions in recent versions of Linux, affecting almost 6000 files. Recently, we have begun using Coccinelle to generate traditional patches for improving the safety of Linux. Some Linux developers have also begun to use the tool. Over 400 of these patches developed using Coccinelle have been integrated into the mainline Linux kernel, and more have been accepted by Linux maintainers and are pending integration. In the ABL project, we will build on the results of Coccinelle by 1) designing libraries of semantic patches to identify API protocols and detect violations in their usage, 2) extending Coccinelle to address the needs of bug finding and reporting, and 3) designing complementary tools to help the programmer to track and fix bugs.

SHAMAN - (2009–2011)

Members:

LIP6 (NPA), Inria Saclay (Grand-Large), Inria Bretagne (ASAP), LIP6 (Regal)

Funding:

SHAMAN project is funded by ANR TELECOM

Objectives:

Large-scale networks (e.g. sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks) typically include several thousands (or even hundred thousand) basic elements (computers, processors) endowed with communication capabilities (low power radio, dedicated fast network, Internet). Because of the large number of involved components, these systems are particularly vulnerable to occurrences of failures or attacks (permanent, transient, intermittent). Our focus in this project is to enable the sustainability of autonomous network functionalities in spite of component failures (lack of power, physical damage, software or environmental interference, etc.) or system evolution (changes in topology, alteration of needs or capacities). We emphasize the self-organization, fault-tolerance, and resource saving properties of the potential solutions. In this project, we will consider two different kinds of large-scale systems: on one hand sensor networks, and on the other hand peer to peer networks.

R-DISCOVER - (2009–2011)

Members:

MIS, LASMEA, GREYC, LIP6 (Regal), Thales

Funding:

R-DISCOVER project is funded by ANR CONTINT

Objectives:

This project considers a set of sensors and mobile robots arbitrarily deployed in a geographical area. Sensors are static. The robots can move and observe the positions of other robots and sensors in the plane and based on these observations they perform some local computations. This project addresses the problem of topological and cooperative navigation of robots in such complex systems.

SPREADS - (2008–2010)

Members:

UbiStorage, LACL, Inria Sophia, Inria (Regal)

Funding:

SPREADS project is funded by ANR TELECOM

Objectives:

This project proposes a collaborative research effort to study and design highly dynamic secure P2P storage systems on large scale networks like the Internet. The scientific program covered by this proposal is mainly the design of new mathematical safety, security and performance models, secure patterns, simulation to evaluate the quality of service of a peer-to-peer storage system in the context of a dynamic large scale network. These models and simulations will eventually be corroborated by experimentation on the Grid 5000 and Grid eXplorer Platforms.

Facoma - (2007–2009)

Members:

LIP6, LIRMM, Regal

Funding:

Facoma project is funded by ANR SETIN

Objectives:

The fault tolerance research community has developped solutions (algorithms and architectures), mostly based on the concept of replication, applied for instance to data bases. But, these techniques are almost always applied explicitely and statically. This is the responsability of the designer of the application to identify explicitly which critical servers should be made robust and also to decide which strategies (active or passive replication) and their configurations (how many replicas, their placement). Meanwhile, regarding new cooperative applications, which are very dynamic, for instance: decision support systems, distributed control, electronic commerce, crisis management systems, and intelligent sensors networks, - such applications increasingly modeled as a set of cooperative agents (multi-agent systems) -, it is very difficult, or even impossible, to identify in advance the most critical agents of the application. This is because the roles and relative importances of the agents can greatly vary during the course of computation, interaction and cooperation, the agents being able to change roles, strategies, plans, and new agents may also join or leave the application (open system). Our approach is in consequence to give the capacity to the multi-agent system itself to dynamically identify the most critical agents and to decide which abilisation strategies to apply to them.

PlayAll - (2007–2009)

Members:

PME: Darkwoks, Atonce, Bionatics, Fandango Games, Load Inc, Kilotonn, Sixela, SpirOps, Voxler, White Birds, Wizrbox - Public: CNAM, ENST, ENJMIN, LIP6 (REgal), LIRIS

Funding:

PLAYALL project is funded by Pôle de Compitivité - Cap Digital

Objectives:

The goal is the build a middleware adapted to the different game platforms (Sony Play Station 3, Nitendo DS, Wii, Xbox, PC). The contribution of Regal concerns distributed algorithms taking into account QoS contraints.

Fracas - (2007–2009)

Members:

ARES (Rhones-Alpes), DIONYSOS (IRISA), Grand-Large (Futurs), Regal(Paris-Rocquencourt)

Funding:

Fracas is funded by INRIA (Action de Recherche Coopérative)

Objectives:

We propose to define a new middleware dedicated for sensor networks. This middleware must tolerate failures and specific attacks these networks are subject.

PACTOL - (2009–2011)

Members:

LIP6 (NPA, Regal), CNAM

Funding:

Digiteo

Objectives:

The scope of PACTOL is to propose verification tools for self-stabilizing distributed algorithms.

MOTAR2 - 2009

Members:

NPA, Regal (LIP6)

Funding:

LIP6

Objectives:

The study of fault tolerance in robot networks.