VISITS and EXCHANGES:
Visits in Sophia-Antipolis:
- Matias Ibañez: 2 months internship in France December2012 – January 2013
- Cristian Ruz, Javier Bustos: One week visit; 25-29 November — SCADA Workshop in Sophia Antipolis
Planned visits for 2014
- Ludovic Henrio: 1 week visit to Chile, planned for January 2014
- Gustavo Pabon: 2 weeks visit to France (planned for February/March 2014)
- Workshop in Santiago later in the week
EVENTS:
- SCADA workshop: Sophia Antipolis — 25-29 November
RESEARCH:
- Distributed and autonomic component systems. Françoise Baude, Ludovic Henrio, Cristian Ruz, Matias Ibanez, Javier Bustos. Component oriented software has become a useful tool to build larger and more complex systems by describing the application in terms of encapsulated, loosely-coupled entities called components.
At the same time, asynchronous programming patterns allow for the development of efficient distributed applications. While several component models and frameworks have been proposed, most of them tightly integrate the component model with the middleware they run upon. This intertwining is generally implicit and not discussed, leading to entangled, hard to maintain code. We wrote an article (in revision at SPE — software practice and experiment) that describes our efforts in the development of the GCM/ProActive framework for providing distributed and adaptable autonomous components. GCM/ProActive integrates a component model designed for execution on large scale environments, with a programming model based on active objects allowing a high degree of distribution and concurrency. This new integrated model provides a more powerful development, composition, and execution environment than other distributed component frameworks. We illustrate that GCM/ProActive is particularly adapted to the programming of autonomic component systems, and to the integration into a service oriented environment.We are developing an autonomic behavior based in monitoring and scheduling of components. We are monitoring some metrics of the components for autonomously adjusting parameters such as the number of components in execution, the amount of tasks for each process, etc; allowing to obtain non-functional information transparently from the application to the programmer of the functional part. We’re testing this autonomic behaviour in a distributed setting. An article on this subject is in preparation.
- Autonomic Algorithmic skeletons. Ludovic Henrio, Gustavo Pabon, Javier Bustos. We studied a novel way to introduce self-configuration and self-optimization autonomic characteristics to algorithmic skeletons using event driven programming techniques.
Based on an algorithmic skeleton language, we showed that the use of events greatly improves the estimation of the remaining computation time for skeleton execution. Events allow us to precisely monitor the status of the execution of algorithmic skeletons. Using such events, we provide a framework for the execution of skeletons with a very high level of adaptability. We focus mainly on guaranteeing a given execution time for a skeleton, by optimizing autonomically the number of threads allocated.
The proposed solution is independent from the platform chosen for executing the skeleton; for example we illustrate our approach in a multicore setting, but it could also be adapted to a distributed execution environment. This work leaded to a paper currently under submission to a workshop: PMAM 2014.We also tested the performance of the autonomic behavior in different examples, and calculating the trade-off of the use of this autonomy. We concluded that the payload of the autonomic module is too high in cases when the tasks are short, and when there are few iterations. That must be taken into account when running tests over an autonomic algorithmic skeleton setting, as the performance penalties may easily overcome the prediction gain. - Behavioural specification and model checking of distributed components. Eric Madelaine, Ludovic Henrio, Tomas Barros, Nuno Gaspar, Dongqian Liu, Oleksandra Kulankhina.
The Grid Component Model (GCM) provides all the means to define reconfigurable component-based applications. We develop the VerCors platform as a specification and verification toolset, including a set of graphical diagram editors for the early specification of the architecture and behavior of GCM components, and tools to check the behavioral properties of such system using model-checking engines. The challenges here are both on the capacity of the tools in order to master the inherent state-space explosion of behavioral models; and on providing tools that can be accessible to non-expert users, hiding the complexity of the underlying formalisms.
This year, we experimented the formal specification and verification of a reconfigurable GCM application in an industrial case study context. The results were published in the FACS conference.
We also discussed with industrial partners of CIRIC in order to provide them safety insurance of their applications for mobile phone.
PUBLICATIONS:
All papers here are direct results of the associated team research. Those that are explicitely co-signed by researchers from the two partners are marked in bold face.
- Behavioural Verification of Distributed Components. paper (HAL)
Ludovic Henrio and Eric Madelaine – In ICE’2013. - Multi-threaded Active Objects. paper (HAL)
Ludovic Henrio, Fabrice Huet, and Zsolt István – In COORDINATION 2013, Springer. 2013. - Nuno Gaspard, Ludovic Henrio, Eric Madelaine; “Formally Reasonning on a Reconfigurable Component-based System – A Case Study for the Industrial World”; 10th Int. Symposium on Formal Aspects of Component Systems (FACS’13), Nanchang, China, Oct. 2013
More to come soon, in particular
- A paper is being submitted authored by Ludovic Henrio and Gustavo Pabon about autonomic behaviour for algorithmic skeletons — submission to PMAM 2014 polanned
- A journal paper involving Cristian Ruz, Francoise Baude and Ludovic Henrio is in the revision process at SPE journal
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