GridCoord DoW

Description of the key projects

In France, there have been 3 main Grid projects. The first two, called VTHD++ and e-Toile, have been concluded. They have made the last one, Grid'5000, possible. The latter is still ongoing.

VTHD ++ VTHD++ project description

VTHD++ is a Very High Broadband IP/WDM test platform for the development of techniques, applications and new generation Internet services. The VTHD++ project aims to enrich the broadband IP test platform deployed for the VTHD (1999-2001) project to develop the technological bricks that will be necessary to the second generation Internet and intranet networks deployment. It lasted 28 months, and was closed by May 2004.

The solution retained closely links objectives for quality of service and bandwidth capacity by adopting an IP/WDM breakthrough architecture that makes use of wavelength division multiplexing optical technologies, but integrating quality of service models being developed on the Internet. The viability of the solution retained is assessed within the framework of real-time interactive services and advanced data applications. The VTHD++ project aims to provide a significant contribution in federating efforts for a new generation Internet. The project is conducted by an industrial prime contractor (FRANCE TELECOM represented by C. Guillemot) responsible for co-ordinating the sub-projects and is the contact for the Ministry concerning contractual questions and project monitoring.

The project involves six principal partners, namely France Telecom Research and Development, INRIA (Rennes, Rocquencourt, Nancy, Lyon, Grenoble and Sophia-Antipolis Research Units), the ENST National Schools of Telecommunications in Paris and in Brittany, the EURECOM Institute in Sophia-Antipolis and the IMAG Institute in Grenoble. Also, the Georges Pompidou European Hospital (HEGP), the Brest University Hospital, and the Grenoble University Hospital are partners respectively associated with INRIA, ENST Brittany, and IMAG. The project is divided into two phases: the first one is the development of the VTHD platform into a service platform, and the second one involves tests for operating and testing the IP transport service.

VTHD++ project funding and rationale

The VTHD project was submitted in response to the call for projects by the RNRT, National Co-operative Network for Telecommunications Research, in 2001. The project lasted 28 months, and the current release of the project was completed by May 2004. The VTHD++ project is partially funded by the DiGITIP, Industry, Information Technologies and Post Department in the Ministry of Industry. As an RNRT platform, the VTHD++ network has the possibility of facilitating tests proposed by other RNRT or RNTL National co-operative Networks projects: for example, the VTHD++ network has been hosting the e-Toile project tests (ENS Lyon, PRISM laboratory, EDF Clamart, CEA Saclay, Sun Microsystems in Grenoble, see below).

VTHD++ project objectives (approved in 2001)

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  Upgrade of the VTHD test platform to a service platform integrating an IPv4 with QoS, an RPV service and multicasting: this will be based on the development of middleware as an intermediary between management tools and network equipment, whose scope will cover resource control and a reduction in the complexity of network equipment administration.
  
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  The operation of MPLS traffic engineering tools and the elaboration of performance parameter measurements for QoS: MPLS traffic engineering will be applied to control routing for circuits hosting one or more service classes; the automation of measurement data collection and processing, and their restoration, aims to automate service class engineering.
  
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  The development of a broadband firewall: the final version of the broadband firewall (Gbit/s) will supplement the IPv6 protocol's built-in capacity to ensure a virtual private network.
  
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  An IPv6 transport offer to anticipate deployment during 2001 of an IPv6 backbone network carried by the VTHD backbone network, the VTHD++ platform will offer intra-VTHD IPv6 connectivity and an access to the 6bone using the establishment of a peering point.
  
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  Active network testing for quality of service and multicasting: the VTHD++ project's specific objective is to associate active network intelligence levels with broadband network's effectiveness.
  
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  Development of data applications: the distributed computing, virtual reality and distributed memory resources are targeted for this phase.
  
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  Elaboration of interactive tests in the telemedecine domain.
  
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  Maintaining the VTHD platform at an optimum level of innovation and the creation of favourable conditions for the platform's usage by other projects: ensuring technical mediation towards the RNRT/RNTL project users of the VTHD platform, the VTHD++ will guarantee successful synergy between these different projects and will contribute to the federating action of working towards a new generation Internet.
  

VTHD++ contact

Christian Guillemot, France Telecom R&D

Technopole Anticipa, 2 avenue Pierre Marzin

22 307 LANNION CEDEX, FRANCE

E-mail: [e-mail]

Reference Web site: http://www.vthd.org/?wpid=7118

e-Toile Project overview

e-Toile is the first major French high performance data transfer grid project. This platform project is supported by the RNTL, National Co-operative Network on Software Technologies. It is coordinated by the CNRS, and brings together almost fifty engineers and researchers from the CNRS, INRIA, and from universities and industries in the data processing sector, including Communication & Systems (CS) and Sun Microsystems. It also includes academic and industrial users: CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission), EDF (French Electricity Board), IBCP (Protein Chemistry and Biology Institute, CNRS), and the PRISM laboratory (University of Versailles). The project started in January 2002 and finished in December 2004, with the following objectives:

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  Research and industry knowledge in the area of distributed computing
  
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  Usability of Grid technology by end-users applications
  
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  Develop and test active networking approach for Grid technology
  

E-Toile project funding and rationale

This first large Grid platform project in France was funded by the RNTL, National Network for Software Technologies. Directed by the CNRS, this project brings together around 50 engineers and researchers from CNRS, INRIA, universities and industry: Communication & Systems, and Sun Microsystems. This concept of high-performance grid has been validated by gridifying complex system software and applications, and by comparing performances with reference implementations like Globus, showing the benefit of active networks and new file systems.

Detailed technical information on the e-Toile Grid

e-Toile is a high performance data processing grid that is operational and interconnected to European and international grids such as DataTag (Trans Atlantic Grid). It is among the leading grids in the world and provides French teams with an extraordinary experimental tool. It has a heterogeneous platform that includes seven geographic locations, ten nodes (server clusters) and 200 different processors with access operating systems with 1 or 2 gigabits/second at each site, provided by France Telecom's VTHD very high speed network.

Conclusion of the project

At the end of the term, the e-Toile project has tackled difficult problems, among which:

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  High performance communication;
  
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  New active network technology;
  
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  Definition of an open and extensible middleware architecture, allowing to include the Globus components and new solutions and approaches.
  

All these questions have been studied and a certain number of solutions proposed. But there are still issues which need further investigating, and experimental studies should be finalized. The software has been written, functionally validated, integrated and deployed. The platform is operational and ready to host experiments.

e-Toile contact

Pascale Primet

LIP, Equipe RESO, ENS Lyon

46, Allée d'Italie, 69364 LYON Cedex 07, FRANCE

e-mail: [e-mail]

Reference Web site: http://www.urec.cnrs.fr/e-Toile/

Grid'5000 Project overview

This initiative is governed by a steering committee, headed by Franck Cappello, and a technical committee gathering several engineers on all Grid’5000 sites.

The project aims at building an experimental Grid platform gathering 10 sites geographically distributed in France, each with 100 to a thousand PCs, connected by Renater, the French National Research and Research Network at 1 Gb/s (10 Gb/s is expected in the near future). The main purpose of this platform is to serve as an experimental testbed for research in Grid computing. This high collaborative research effort is funded by the French Ministry of Research, INRIA, CNRS, the local universities of all sites and some regional councils. Moreover, depending on the local relations of each site, industry partners have been involved through discount rates for hardware equipment and/or research contracts. This concerns mainly IBM, Sun, and Apple.

The originality of this project is that it is in some sense bottom-up, in contrast with the previous top-down actions. A number of groups decided to put in common their resources, whatever their origin, and to collaborate into Grid'5000 in a research effort developing a large-scale nation wide infrastructure for Grid research. Ten laboratories are involved, nation wide, in the objective of providing the community of Grid researchers a testbed allowing experiments in all the software layers between the network protocols up to the applications: applications, algorithms, runtime, middleware, operating systems, network protocols. Grid'5000 will allow Grid experiments France-wide in all these software layers.

This project aims at building an experimental Grid platform gathering 8 sites geographically distributed in France, each with 100 to a thousand PCs, connected by Renater, the French National Research and Research Network at 1 Gb/s (10 Gb/s is expected in the near future). The main purpose of this platform is to serve as an experimental testbed for research in Grid Computing. This initiative is governed by a steering committee, headed by Franck Cappello, and a technical committee gathering several engineers in all Grid’5000 sites.

Funding and rationale

In addition to theory, simulators and emulators, there is a strong need for large scale testbeds where real life experimental conditions hold. The size of Grid'5000, in terms of number of sites and number of CPUs per site, was established according to the scale of the experiments and the number of researchers involved in the project. This high collaborative research effort is funded by the French ministry of Education and Research, INRIA, CNRS, the Universities at the sites and some regional councils. More precisely, financial help has been provided by

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  The ACI GRID Research programme of the Ministry of Research (2 Grid'5000 specific calls);
  
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  The ACI MD Research programme on Data Masses co-funded by the Ministry of Research, CNRS and INRIA (specific support for the Grid eXplorer 1000-proc cluster sub-project located at Orsay);
  
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  Regional research programmes: regions and departments;
  
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  INRIA specific calls;
  
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  Two CNRS calls (eGrid'5000 and Programming the grid).
  

The total sum received for this project is € 7.778 M. Funding given to the different contributors for the Grid'5000 Project is in k€.

Experiment Summary

The main objective of the project is to provide the community of Grid researchers in France with an experimental platform for their research, fully configurable for each experiment. The scope of the experiments that could be conducted on Grid'5000 covers all the software stack layers between the user and the Grid hardware (clusters and networks), from network protocols to applications. In each case, the experiment may gain access to the whole parameters of the Grid, performing radical changes like OS substitution if desired. Here is a list of proposed experiments:

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  Networking
  

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  End Host Communication layer
  
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  High performance long distance protocols
  
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  High Speed Network Emulation
  

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  Middleware/ OS:
  

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  Grid'5000 control/access
  
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  Grid'5000 experiment automation
  
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  Scheduling / data distribution in Grid
  
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  Fault tolerance in Grid
  
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  Resource management
  
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  Grid SSI OS and Grid I/O
  
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  Desktop Grid/P2P systems
  

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  Programming:
  

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  Component programming for the Grid (Java, Corba)
  
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  GRID-RPC
  
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  GRID-MPI
  
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  Code Coupling
  

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  Applications:
  

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  Multi-parametric applications (Climate Modelling/Functional Genomic)
  
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  Large scale experimentation of distributed applications (Electromagnetism, multi-material fluid mechanics, parallel optimization algorithms, CFD, astrophysics)
  
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  Medical images, Collaborating tools in virtual 3D environment
  

Partner laboratories

This is not an exhaustive list of all the institutes involved. It only concerns the sites which provide nodes to the Grid. A detailed document on the users of Grid'5000, written for the Ministry, is under way, and should be published very soon.

ID-IMAG: http://www-id.imag.fr/

INRIA Futurs / PCRI: http://www-futurs.inria.fr/

INRIA Sophia:http://www-sop.inria.fr/

INRIA Rennes / IRISA:http://www.irisa.fr/

IRIT, LAAS: http://www.irit.fr/

HYPERLINK "http://www.laas.fr/" http://www.laas.fr/

LABRI: http://dept-info.labri.fr/

LIFL: http://www.lifl.fr/

LIP: http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/

Grid'5000 contact

Franck CAPPELLO

Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique

Bâtiment 490, Université Paris Sud

91405 ORSAY CEDEX, FRANCE

email: [e-mail]
Reference Web site: http://www.grid5000.org/