Kerlabs founders : Pascall Gallard, Louis Rilling and Rennaud Lottiaux.

Former expert engineers with INRIA/Irisa, Renaud Lottiaux and Pascal Gallard are (two of the three) co-founders of Kerlabs, a company incubated by within the research center, in Rennes.  Put on track in fall 2006, this spinoff delivers services associated to an operating system dedicated to cluster management (1).  “Kerrighed is a Linux-based GPL OS  which aims at making user’s life easier when dealing with clusters. Enjoying the computing power of, say, 32 machines is fine. But at the end of the day, you are still dealing with… 32 machines and resource management remains manual. This task proves irksome and bothersome to a lot of people for whom cluster management is not the main job. Kerrighed addresses the problem and makes it easy,” Lottiaux sums up. The OS hides all the entanglement of cluster resource: CPU, memory and disks… “It takes care of everything. The user doesn’t see many small machines anymore, but just a big one.”

Now, why go open source? “We brought the idea when the operating system was still at research level within Inria (2). We all come from the free world. We love it. Let’s call this a philosophical choice around the idea of sharing software. And, at INRIA, we were among the first, if not the very first, to go GPL.” Inria, CNRS and CEA altogether have put up their own flavor of GPL, called CeCILL (3). But Kerrighed sticks to the genuine General Public License. “It goes without saying when you build upon a Linux base and start to modify it.”

Choosing Linux also makes sense because “a large majority of clusters worldwide are Linux/Unix machines.” Another thing is: “open source simply does it better, Pascal Gallard points out. It brings higher quality because proof readers are more numerous. It makes it more reliable. And since there are more developers involved, the product also ends up with more functionalities. Plus, we wouldn’t have been able to carry out such an ambitious project otherwise.”

Kerrighed  being an open plateform, “everybody is welcome. We wish to be joined by other developers, Lottiaux remarks. We haven’t received much help from outside developers yet as clusters and Kerrighed both require rare in-depth skills.” Granting customers access to source code also “proves reassuring, compare to black box world. But being free can also enable Kerrighed to reach the whole world for a derisory sum.” Indeed, GPL wonderland has its own information channels: scads of websites, strings of directories and, last but not least… distributions. “Our hope is to get included within Oscar, a special distribution for clustering. That would make us better known.”

Having said that, being free also comes with a problem for spin-off company Kerlabs. “It makes the economic model harder to define”, Lottiaux admits. GPL-kernel Kerrighed comes free and complete “but we can make business by delivering associated services. Say: fine-tuning efficiency, optimizing stability, performing specific development, etc...”

At this stage, the OS is still a research prototype that needs engineering work before hitting the market. “Commercial activity will start at moderate pace during the first year. Active canvassing is scheduled for late 2007, early 2008,” Gallard says. “So, we are on our way, and our presence at Linux Expo is chiefly designed to let the community know about it”, Lottiaux warns. We will be soon knocking at the door.”

“At the moment, we aim at meeting  people (4)  who are representative of the field, remarks Gallard. We want to better ascertain what is their vision of the subject, and by so doing, end up with a profile regarding cluster market.” Until now, these networks of computers were toys for big companies only.  Typically, these users would line up hundreds or thousands of nodes. The market was big fleet-driven. “We all remember Titanic, which picture rendering was performed on clusters.  Another typical example is weather forecast calculation.” But things are changing. “Now, medium size businesses also express needs for clustered calculation and storage for instance.” Nevertheless, a stumbling block remains: price tag. Not everybody can afford big clusters. “Buying is expensive. Maintaining too. And software cost can be just as high as hardware.”  Money reason makes customer fancy smaller size clusters for more pinpointed applications. “That’s the trend nowadays.” But on the other hand, the market is about to soar. “In France, clusters now account for roughly 30% of all servers” while they were peanuts a mere 10 years ago.

Footnotes

(1) A cluster is a group of computers that work together. They are usually connected to each other through fast local area networks.

(2) The project was born out of Lottiaux’s thesis back in the late 90s. Research resulted of cooperation between Inria, the Rennes University and EDF. 

(3) CeCILL (from "CEA CNRS INRIA Logiciel Libre") is a free software license adapted to both international and French legal matters, in the spirit of the GNU General Public License. See : http://www.cecill.info

(4) Kerlabs will also organize the first Kerrighed summit, after Linux Expo , on February 2, 2007, in Paris La Défense. Check INRIA booth for more.