This collaboration has started 2 years ago though a bilateral project co-funded by the CNRS and the Romanian Academy of Science. With this support, 2 PhD students from the KerData Team visited the PUB Team for short visits (10 days each) and one PhD student from PUB, whereas one PhD student from PUB visited the KerData for one month. Besides, thanks to INRIA's Internships Programme, the PARIS Team could host 2 PhD students and 1 MS students from PUB and the KerData Team could host one MS student from PUB. Finally, note that 3 PhD students now members of INRIA's KerData Team have previously graduated as engineers at PUB, in Bucharest: this strongly impacts the efficiency of our contacts. Most of the PhD students mentioned above will be involved in the associate team. The detailed steps of the collaboration are presented below.
June 2007: Gabriel Antoniu makes an exploratory visit at the National Center for Information Technology (NCIT) within Politehnica University of Bucharest (PUB), where he meets Nicolae Tapus and Valentin Cristea, Professors at this University, in charge of the Distributed Systems and Grids team. Both sides present the research activities of their respective teams in the area of distributed systems and quickly realize that a collaboration can clearly be established by leveraging the complementary expertise of the two teams. The PUB Team has indeed a strong experience in the area of large-scale distributed monitoring, which can prove extremely useful in the context of large-scale data-sharing on grids, the research field of Gabriel Antoniu and Luc Bougé (within the PARIS Project-Team at that time). The two sides then decide start this collaboration through a bilateral project.
September 2007: a bilateral project is submitted as a response to a call for projects jointly issued by the French CNRS and by the Romanian Academy of Science. The project is accepted for the period 1/1/2008 - 31/12/2009. It is called "GridDataViz: Visualisation et contrôle à distance pour une plate-forme de partage de données sur grille basée sur des techniques pair-à-pair" and focuses on Grid monitoring and data management in Grid environments. It aims at exploiting the results obtained in the PARIS Project-Team in the area of grid data management (through the JuxMem project) and those obtained at PUB on Grid monitoring, scheduling and simulation.
October 2007: After his graduation as an engineer at PUB (where he ranks 1/300), Bogdan Nicolae joins the PARIS Project-Team at INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique as a PhD student, under the supervision of Gabriel Antoniu and Luc Bougé. His immediately brings significant contributions leading to the design and the implementation of a new prototype for large-scale sharing of massive data, accessed with high concurrency. The BlobSeer approach is born!
July 2008: Valentin Cristea (PUB) and Nicolae Tapus (PUB) visit the PARIS Project-Team. Discussions take place about the status of the bilateral collaboration. The two guests have exploratory discussions about future possible extensions of the current bilateral collaboration with Patrick Bouthemy, Head of INRIA Rennes-Bretagne Atlantique, Thierry Priol (then leader of the PARIS Project-Team), Christine Morin (leader of the XtreemOS project). They also meet Olivier Ridoux and discuss about student exchanges within the ERASMUS framework.
October 2008: 3 new candidates freshly graduated as engineers at PUB join INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique to start their PH.D. theses: Alexandra Carpen-Amarie and Diana Moise (co-advised by Gabriel Antoniu and Luc Bougé within the PARIS Project-Team, now members of the KerData team) and Izabela Moise (supervised by Michel Hurfin within the ADEPT project-team).
November 2008: within the framework of the GridDataViz bilateral project, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Diana Moise make a visit to PUB. They also participate to the HiPerGrid International Workshop, co-organized by our partner team at PUB, where they present 3 papers.
June 2009: Alexandru Costan, PhD student at PUB visits the group of Luc Bougé and Gabriel Antoniu within the PARIS Project-Team for one month and contributes to the GridDataViz project. His efficient interactions with the members of the future KerData Team (then in process of being created) leads to two research reports, submitted for publication. This work opens new research perspectives that are now part of the planned work of this associate team.
1 July 2009: the KerData Team is created as a joint team of INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique and ENS Cachan - Antenne de Bretagne. It includes Luc Bougé (team leader), Gabriel Antoniu (INRIA Researcher) and their 3 PhD students all of which come from... PUB!
June-October 2009: Eliana Tirsa and Catalin Leordeanu, PhD students and Stefania Costache, Master student from PUB, all supervised by Valentin Cristea, are hosted by the PARIS Project-Team (co-financed by INRIA's Internships program). They work under the supervision of Christine Morin in the context of the XtreemOS grid operating system project: their results are published as technical reports and will significantly serve as initial steps for the future research planned for this associate team.
September 2009 - January 2010: Mihaela Vlad, Master student at PUB is hosted by the KerData Team for a 5-month research internship. She is co-funded by INRIA's Internships program and by the University of Rennes 1. Her work also contributes to the GridDataViz project.
October 2009: Based on the convincing results of our interactions since 2007 and given the high potential for scientific collaboration and for intensive student exchanges at Master and PhD level, the KerData and PARIS Teams and the PUB Team define this project proposal for an associate team.
2010 and later: joint PhD and MS supervision. We also plan to involve other Romanian PhD students, as new PhD candidates may join the PUB Team in the future years. We also started to explore with the French Consulate of Bucharest (SCAC) the available funding possibilities for joint PhD thesis supervision (one or two), to start in 2010 (and possibly in 2011). Parts of the work programme will be proposed as research subjects to 2 master students at PUB and to 2 Master students at INRIA Rennes (one student from the local Master programme in Rennes and one student to be recruited through INRIA's Internships programme). The Master students will be co-advised by members of the both French and Romanian teams.
The collaboration established between PUB with the KerData and PARIS Teams at INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique began to be productive in terms of co-authored research papers especially thanks to the presence of 5 PUB interns (4 PhD students, 1 MS student, see above) hosted by the two INRIA teams in 2009. Note that most of these results are very recent: they have been (or are in the process of being) published as INRIA Research reports. Some of them are already submitted for publication to international conferences and workshops.
Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Cai Jing, Alexandru Costan, Gabriel Antoniu, Luc Bougé. Bringing Introspection Into the BlobSeer Data-Management System Using the MonALISA Distributed Monitoring Framework. INRIA Research Report N° RR-7043, September 2009. Submitted for publication. Available on HAL: http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00419978/.
Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Cai Jing, Luc Bougé, Gabriel Antoniu, Alexandru Costan. Monitoring the BlobSeer distributed data-management platform using the MonALISA framework. INRIA Research Report N° RR-7018, August 2009. Submitted for publication. Available on HAL: http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00410216/.
Eliana-Dina Tîrsa, Jérôme Gallard, Pierre Riteau, Yvon Jégou, Christine Morin.Towards XtreemOS in the Clouds: Automatic deployment of the XtreemOS Grid Operating System in a Nimbus Cloud. Publication as an INRIA Technical Report in progress.
Catalin Leordeanu, Thomas Ropars, Christine Morin. Failure Detection in Large-Scale Distributed Systems - Building a Failure History Storage. Publication as an INRIA Research Report in progress.
Other joint papers (less relevant to the focus of this project) include:
Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Mugurel Ionut Andreica, Valentin Cristea. An Algorithm for File Transfer Scheduling in Grid Environments. In Proc. 2nd International Workshop on High Performance Grid Middleware (HiPerGrid), Bucharest, Romania, November 2008. Available on HAL: http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00343793/.
Diana Moise, Izabela Moise, Florin Pop, Valentin Cristea. Resource CoAllocation for Scheduling Tasks with Dependencies, in Grid. In Proc. 2nd International Workshop on High Performance Grid Middleware (HiPerGrid), Bucharest, Romania, November 2008. Available on HAL: http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00343770/.
Izabela Moise, Diana Moise, Florin Pop, Valentin Cristea. Advance reservation of resources for task execution in grid environments. In Proc. 2nd International Workshop on High Performance Grid Middleware (HiPerGrid), Bucharest, Romania, November 2008. Available on HAL: http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00343780/.