The KerData team is looking for highly-motivated candidates for junior INRIA Research positions (chargés de recherche) and for research and teaching positions (maître de conférence) at the University of Rennes 1. Pre-requisite: PhD in computer science, specialized in parallel/distributed computing

Contact: Luc.Bouge@bretagne.ens-cachan.fr or Gabriel.Antoniu@inria.fr.

The KerData team proposes two subjects within the framework of INRIA's Internships programme. To apply, please contact the local correspondent of this programme in your institution: he will centralise all applications from the institution and transmit them to INRIA.

The emerging cloud computing model is gaining serious interest from both industry and academia in the area of large-scale distributed computing. It provides a new paradigm for managing computing resources: instead of buying and managing hardware, users rent virtual machines and storage space. The client applications are executed by the service provider as a set of virtual machines in a secure environment that enforces several restrictions, according to some pre-established contract. In such a context, access to local storage space on the physical machine where the application is running (owned by the service provider) is typically denied. Clients are instead provided with a specialized storage service they can access directly, through a specific API (e.g., Amazon S3).

The KerData research team (http://www.irisa.fr/kerdata/) of INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique, is investigating ways to address the main challenges raised by data storage and management on cloud infrastructures. The team is designing and implementing BlobSeer (http://blobseer.gforge.inria.fr/), a generic data-sharing platform which aims at providing support for storing massive data with fine-grained access control under heavy concurrency on large-scale distributed infrastructures.

The goal of this work is to design and implement client monitoring mechanisms based on the MonALISA framework (http://monalisa.cern.ch). The goal is to ensure that the contract established with the provider is being respected. Related to security in this context, the storage service has to be aware of the different types of clients and of their access rights. Based on configurable policies that can be implemented based on MonALISA, BlobSeer will support different access patterns and enforce adaptive security rules. Moreover, the MonALISA monitoring framework can be used to monitor and to detect malicious behavior. In case of such events, MonALISA will alert the administrators or automatically implement pre-defined policies (e.g., blacklisting users and banning access for specific periods of time).

The work will be conducted in close collaboration with the Distributed Systems and Grids team from Politehnica University of Bucharest (http://csite.cs.pub.ro/ds_team), who is strongly involved in the design and implementation of the MonALISA framework.

Gabriel Antoniu, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie (KerData team, INRIA), Catalin Leordeanu (Politehnica University of Bucharest)

The emerging cloud computing model is gaining serious interest from both industry and academia in the area of large-scale distributed computing. It provides a new paradigm for managing computing resources: instead of buying and managing hardware, users rent virtual machines and storage space. The KerData research team (http://www.irisa.fr/kerdata/) of INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique, is investigating ways to address the main challenges raised by data storage and management on cloud infrastructures. The team is designing and implementing BlobSeer (http://blobseer.gforge.inria.fr/), a generic data-sharing platform which aims at providing support for storing massive data with fine-grained access control under heavy concurrency on large-scale distributed infrastructures.

The aim of this internship is to explore how BlobSeer can be used to offer advanced data sharing facilities to collaborating clients running within distinct VMs on a Nimbus-enabled cloud. Nimbus is one of the most visible cloud middleware projects currently available, developed at the Argonne National Lab (USA). There are two main goals that need to be reached. First, design and implement an IaaS client access interface that supports the deployment and management of a BlobSeer instance. This BlobSeer instance is used to share the application data among the VMs running the application. The client access interface must be integrated with the Nimbus cloud software (developed at Argonne National Lab). It should offer the same level of functionality as with the client access interface offered by Nimbus for virtual machine deployment and management. Second, we need to design and implement an interface for accessing the BlobSeer data-sharing service for the application running inside the VM. This access interface must access the same BlobSeer instance from within any VM regardless of the physical machine where the VM is deployed on. BlobSeer's API will be directly made available as a distributed file system.

Gabriel Antoniu, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie (KerData team, INRIA), Eliana Tirsa (Politehnica University of Bucharest)