Essentially, any software entity that goes beyond simply computing a certain function necessarily has to interact and share resources with other such entities. Correct coordination of access to resources among concurrent software entities is fundamental to ensuring that they satisfy user and system requirements avoiding operational faults and deadlock situations. This proposal targets the correct coordination of access to cloud resources among concurrent cloud application entities.
Trình Lê Khánh has defended his PhD on the 27th of January, 2023. Congratulations Trình!
Context
Modern software systems are inherently concurrent. They consist of components running simultaneously and sharing access to resources provided by the execution platform. For instance, embedded control software in various domains, ranging from household robotics through operation of smart power-grids to onboard satellite software, commonly comprises, in addition to components responsible for taking the control decisions, a set of components driving the operation of sensing and actuation devices. These components interact through buses, shared memories and message buffers, leading to resource contention and potential deadlocks compromising mission- and safety-critical operations. Similar problems are observed in various kinds of software: system, work-flow management, integration software, as well as cloud computing platforms and applications, which are the main application domain of this proposal. Components of cloud applications interact through cloud resources such as virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual storages, application servers, database managers, middleware services, etc. Thereby, cloud resource sharing can lead to cloud resource contention, potential deadlocks, and operational faults.
Essentially, any software entity that goes beyond simply computing a certain function necessarily has to interact and share resources with other such entities. Correct coordination of access to resources among concurrent software entities is fundamental to ensuring that they satisfy user and system requirements avoiding operational faults and deadlock situations. This proposal targets the correct coordination of access to cloud resources among concurrent cloud application entities.
Host laboratory
Spirals (Self-adaptation for distributed services and large software systems) is a project-team at Inria Lille –Nord Europe research centre. Its research program focuses on defining self-adaptive distributed software services and systems. In particular, one of the two key properties that it targets is self-optimisation, i.e. the capability of systems to continuously reason about themselves and to take appropriate decisions and actions on the optimisations they can apply to improve their usage of the available resources. In order to provide this capability, Spirals is conducting a study of mechanisms for monitoring, taking decisions, and automatically reconfiguring software at run-time and at various scales.
In the domain of (multi-)cloud computing, Spirals researchers study both platform (re)configuration and application design. Both aspects involve complex concurrent software systems, which must be capable of self-adaptation while ensuring correctness in spite of subtle dependencies both among the software components and between components and the resources provided by the execution platforms. Thus, this proposal targets the design of cloud applications, which are both correct-by-construction and self-adaptive, using formal methods.
The work on multi-cloud application design is structured around OCCIware—a model-driven cloud resource management framework [5] based on the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standard, providing a unique and unified framework to manage OCCI artefacts (documents, specifications, models, code and tools) and, at the same time, representing a factory to build domain-specific modeling frameworks for cloud computing, where each framework targets a specific cloud domain, such as infrastructure management, container management, application management, elasticity management, etc.
Proposed research project
OCCIwareOCCIware
Currently, FSM specifications OCCIware
In order to ensure acceptance of the project results by software developers, one has to minimise the effort, which they must put into providing additional specifications. The third step of the project will consist of developing algorithms and infrastructure for learning an FSM model of a cloud application by interacting with it and observing its execution traces [1].
Partnership and collaboration
The results of this research project, i.e.
- the integration of JavaBIP into OCCIware,
- the DSL to specify cloud application self-adaptiveness,
- learning algorithms and infrastructure,
will be validated against cloud applications provided by three of Spirals partners: XScalibur, Scalair, and Orange Lab. XScalibur is a spin-off company originating from Spirals, which develops and markets the Multi-Cloud Studio—a product based on the OCCIware framework—for automatisation and administration of virtualised resources provided by heterogeneous cloud computing platforms. Scalair, a regional cloud architect and operator, is our partner in the CIRRUS joint-team. Our partner Orange Labs will bring us applications from the domain of Network Virtualisation Functions (NFV), which consists of the cloudification of network functions.
Estimated work plan
- M0-M6 – State of the art on the correct coordination of concurrent cloud resources and cloud applications.
Milestone 1: Submission of this SotA to a top-level review (e.g. ACM Computing Surveys). - M6-M12 – Integration of JavaBIP inside OCCIware (i.e. first step), and validation against partner’s applications.
Milestone 2: Submission of an international conference paper (e.g. IEEE CLOUD). - M12-M18 – Design and implementation of the cloud application self-adaptiveness specification language (i.e. second step), and validation against partner’s applications.
Milestone 3: Submission of an international conference paper (e.g. COORDINATION). - M18-M24 – Design and implementation of learning algorithms and infrastructure (i.e. third step), and validation against partner’s applications.
Milestone 4: Submission of an international conference paper (e.g. ICML). - M24-M30 – Integration of the three steps, and validation against partner’s applications.
Milestone 5: Submission of a top-level review article (e.g. IEEE TCC). - M30-M36 – Preparation of the manuscript.
Milestone 6: PhD thesis defence.
Required skills
The following skills are required for this project:
- Knowledge of cloud computing
- Basics of formal methods (e.g. automata, predicate
logics ) - Proficiency in the Java programming language
- Fluent English (both speaking and writing)
The following skills are not required, but could constitute a plus:
- Advanced knowledge of formal methods (e.g. temporal logics)
- Constraint programming
References
- Dana Angluin (1987): Learning regular sets from queries and counterexamples. Information and Computation 75(2), pp. 87–106.
- Ananda Basu, Saddek Bensalem, Marius Bozga, Jacques Combaz, Mohamad Jaber, Thanh-Hung Nguyen & Joseph Sifakis (2011): Rigorous Component-Based System Design Using the BIP Framework. IEEE Software 28(3), pp. 41–48.
- Simon Bliudze, Anastasia Mavridou, Radoslaw Szymanek & Alina Zolotukhina (2017): Exogenous coordination of concurrent software components with JavaBIP. Software: Practice and Experience 47(11), pp. 1801–1836.
- Simon Bliudze & Joseph Sifakis (2007): The Algebra of Connectors — Structuring Interaction in BIP. In: Proceedings of the EMSOFT’07, ACM SigBED, Salzburg, Austria, pp. 11–20.
- Faiez Zalila, Stéphanie Challita & Philippe Merle (2019): Model-Driven Cloud Resource Management with OCCIware. Future Generation Computer Systems. To appear.