Projects

This project addresses the dilemma of improving the efficiency of resilient systems while keeping the software systems correct and easy to develop and use. The project proposes a novel concurrency control protocol for replicated systems, exploiting some new hardware features, and a new transactional API, promoting the concurrent execution of operations in all replicas and reducing the conflicts between those operations. The project’s results have the potential to improve the resilience, and reduce the energy consumption, of computer systems.

This project aims at investigating how to ease the application development in clusters of multi-core machines. It proposes to provide the programmer with a single system image over a cluster of multi-core nodes, allowing the programs running in the different nodes to share a set of objects, and making use of the transactional paradigm to control the overall system consistency.

The project aims at developing the VIRTU tool for the management and configuration of applications on a virtualized environment. The development uses as baseline the GoVI solution being developed by ORISTEBA/EVOLVE to the European Space Agency (ESA), and will make improvements on the way to generalize the solutions to other customers in particular the configuration of applications. This tool targets mainly the use cases of testing and developing applications in complex distributed environments as well as the server infrastructure consolidation. Its commercialization is foreseen as a product complemented with services.

This project proposes a novel vision of a hyperlocal edge-cloud, i.e., a computational/storage cloud comprised solely of a collection of nearby wireless edge devices, with the purpose of pooling these devices’ data and processing power to support a new class of proximity-aware applications that benefit the owners of these devices.

This project aims at reducing the cost of testing concurrent applications by shortening the testing phase, which is achieved by the parallelization of the testing procedures.

The aim of the HPCTI project is to develop a toolset for the development of parallel application programs for distributed memory multiprocessors, including networks of distributed workstations. The project focuses on the following key research issues in parallel systems engineering: visual programming, simulation, mapping and load-balancing, monitoring, visualization and quality issues.

The overall aim of the SEPP project is to develop a toolset for the development of parallel application programs for distributed memory multiprocessors, including networks of distributed workstations. The project focuses on the following key research issues in parallel systems engineering: visual programming; simulation; mapping and load-balancing; monitoring; visualisation; and quality issues. The objectives are oriented towards, and the research conducted within, the constraints of industrial relevance. The project is conducted within two broad phases: i) specification of an open system model of a graphical computer-aided software engineering (CASE) environment to support the development lifecycle of generic, distributed-memory multiprocessor systems; and ii) development of CASE tools at the partners’ sites conforming to the open systems model developed in phase i).

This project addresses the emergent challenges in the design and implementation of modern data storage and management systems regarding the needs of global-scale distributed systems such as social networks and emerging large-scale IoT applications that are expected to generate and manipulate an unprecedented amount of data.

The goal of this project is to define a data-centric concurrency control model that is correct by design, and usable in practice, in the sense that it may be efficiently implemented and deliver good performances.

This project this project we propose adopting a decentralized architecture where mobile devices communi- cate directly and rely on cloud and edge resources for providing efficient, highly available and reliable solutions.

SwiftComp will address real-time, incremental data processing data by tightly integrating computations into a decentralized storage system, striving for both performance and resilience, to ensure deterministic computations in the presence of faults. Moreover, it will pursue a programming model for combining computation and storage abstractions is a seamless way, including provisions for computations that process live streams and globally consistent snapshots of partial or whole datasets.

Large-scale on-line services including social networks and multiplayer games handle huge quantities of frequently changing shared data. Maintaining its consistency is relatively simple in a centralised cloud, but no longer possible due to increased scalability requirements. Instead, data must replicated across several distributed data centres, requiring new principled approaches to consistency that will be explored by the SyncFree project. Large-scale on-line services including social networks and multiplayer games handle huge quantities of frequently changing shared data. Maintaining its consistency is relatively simple in a centralised cloud, but no longer possible due to increased scalability requirements. Instead, data must replicated across several distributed data centres, requiring new principled approaches to consistency that will be explored by the SyncFree project.

This project aims at investigating how the multiple processing units in emerging multicore platforms can be used to improve the performance and reliability of applications. The idea is to use these cores to run replicated components that use alternate implementations (algorithms, data structures, etc.). Performance will be improved by using the best implementation for a particular operation, while reliability will be improved by using the redundancy available.

The central goal of this project is to build a replicated database system that tolerates Byzantine faults. The main challenge resides in the fact that Byzantine fault tolerance replication introduces a non-negligible performance overhead. This fact, combined with the necessity of the use of eager replication, has led to a low adoption of Byzantine fault tolerance in database replication. This project aims at developing novel techniques for improving the performance of Byzantine fault tolerant replicated databases.

This Action aims to build expertise by putting together active researchers in different aspects of runtime verification, and meeting with experts from potential application disciplines. The main goal is to overcome the fragmentation of RV research by (1) the design of common input formats for tool cooperation and comparison; (2) the evaluation of different tools, building a growing sets benchmarks and running tool competitions; and (3) by designing a road-map and grand challenges extracted from application domains.

Parallel programing used to be an area once confined to a few niches, such as scientific and high- performance computing applications. However, with the proliferation of multicore processors, and the emergence of new, inherently parallel and distributed deployment platforms, such as those provided by cloud computing, parallel programming has definitely become a mainstream concern. Transactional Memories (TMs) answer the need to find a better programming model for PP, capable of boosting developers’ productivity and allowing ordinary programrs to unleash the power of parallel and distributed architectures avoiding the pitfalls of manual, lock based synchronization. It is therefore no surprise that TM has been subject to intense research in the last years. This action aims at consolidating European research on this important field, by coordinating the European research groups working on the development of complementary, interdisciplinary aspects of Transactional Memories, including theoretical foundations, algorithms, hardware and operating system support, language integration and development tools, and applications.

The objective of this concerted action is the provision of a mechanism whereby High Performance Computing (HPC) skills, tools and experience can be transferred across Europe and the emerging economies of Eastern Europe and the NIS in the hope of stimulating economic growth. Specifically, this will provide a tightly coupled outlet to the major developments made in HPC by the steering group members in the two Copernicus projects Software Engineering for Parallel Processing and High Performance Computing Tools for Industry.