David Margery

A General Framework for Cooperative Manipulation in Virtual Environments

Whereas cooperation and collaboration have become two popular words in virtual reality, the problem of cooperative manipulation has been mainly left aside due to the great number of other challenges facing anyone trying to setup multi-user worlds. We define cooperative manipulation as a situation where two or more users interact on the same object in a concurrent but cooperative way. The focus of this paper is to describe an experiment whose goal was to experiment problems specific of cooperative manipulation setups. Those problems include synchronizing user’s input over the network, mapping user’s input into a meaningful 3-D movement thanks to what we call a model of activity and giving him relevant visual information. In this paper, we present a general framework able to take into account these problems.It is compatible with physically simulated objects and has been implemented using Java, VRML and a distributed approach.

Adding Virtualization Capabilities to the Grid’5000 Testbed

Almost ten years after its premises, the Grid’5000 testbed has become one of the most complete testbed for designing or evaluating large-scale distributed systems. Initially dedicated to the study of High Performance Computing, the infrastructure has evolved to address wider concerns related to Desktop Computing, the Internet of Services and more recently the Cloud Computing paradigm. This paper present recent improvements of the Grid’5000 software and services stack to support large-scale experiments using virtualization technologies as building blocks. Such contributions include the deployment of customized software environments, the reservation of dedicated network domain and the possibility to isolate them from the others, and the automation of experiments with a REST API. We illustrate the interest of these contributions by describing three different use-cases of large-scale experiments on the Grid’5000 testbed. The first one leverages virtual machines to conduct larger experiments spread over 4000 peers. The second one describes the deployment of 10000 KVM instances over 4 Grid’5000 sites. Finally, the last use case introduces a one-click deployment tool to easily deploy major IaaS solutions. The conclusion highlights some important challenges of Grid’5000 related to the use of OpenFlow and to the management of applications dealing with tremendous amount of data.

Energy Management in IaaS Clouds: A Holistic Approach

Energy efficiency has now become one of the major design constraints for current and future cloud data center operators. One way to conserve energy is to transition idle servers into a lower power-state (e.g. suspend). Therefore, virtual machine (VM) placement and dynamic VM scheduling algorithms are proposed to facilitate the creation of idle times. However, these algorithms are rarely integrated in a holistic approach and experimentally evaluated in a realistic environment. In this paper we present the energy management algorithms and mechanisms of a novel holistic energy-aware VM management framework for private clouds called Snooze. We conduct an extensive evaluation of the energy and performance implications of our system on 34 power-metered machines of the Grid5000 experimentation testbed under dynamic web workloads. The results show that the energy saving mechanisms allow Snooze to dynamically scale data center energy consumption proportionally to the load, thus achieving substantial energy savings with only limited impact on application performance.

Ghost Process: a Sound Basis to Implement Process Duplication, Migration and Checkpoint/Restart in Linux Clusters

Process management mechanisms (process duplication, migration and checkpoint/restart) are very useful for high performance and high availability in clustering systems. The single system image approach aims at providing a global process management service with mechanisms for process checkpoint, process migration and process duplication. In this context, a common mechanism for process virtualization is highly desirable but traditional operating systems do not provide such a mechanism. This paper presents a kernel service for process virtualization called ghost process, extending the Linux kernel. The ghost process mechanism has been implemented in the Kerrighed single system image based on Linux

BonFIRE: The Clouds and Services Testbed

BonFIRE is a multi-site test bed that supports testing of Cloud-based and distributed applications. BonFIRE breaks the mould of commercial Cloud offerings by providing unique functionality in terms of observability, control, advanced Cloud features and ease of use for experimentation. A number of successful use cases have been executed on BonFIRE, involving industrial and academic users and delivering impact in diverse areas, such as media, e-health, environment and manufacturing. The BonFIRE user-base is expanding through its free, Open Access scheme, daily carrying out important research, while the consortium is working to sustain the facility beyond 2014.

On Achieving Energy Efficiency and Reducing CO 2 Footprint in Cloud Computing

With the increasing popularity of the cloud computing model and rapid proliferation of cloud infrastructures there are increasing concerns about energy consumption and consequent impact of cloud computing as a contributor to global CO2 emissions. To date, little is known about how to incorporate energy consumption and CO2 concerns into cloud application development and deployment decision models. In this respect, this paper describes an eco-aware approach that relies on the definition, monitoring and utilization of energy and CO2 metrics combined with the use of innovative application scheduling and runtime adaptation techniques to optimize energy consumption and CO2 footprint of cloud applications as well as the underlying infrastructure. The eco-aware approach involves measuring or quantifying the energy consumption and CO2 at different levels of cloud computing, using that information to create scheduling and adaptation techniques that contribute towards reducing the energy consumption and CO2 emissions, and finally testing and validating the developed solutions in a multi-site cloud environment with the help of challenging case study applications. The experimental and validation results show the potential of the eco-aware approach to significantly reduce the CO2 footprint and consequent environmental impact of cloud applications.

Cloud and Network Facilities Federation in BonFIRE

In recent years we have seen how Cloud Computing is changing the way of doing businesses and how services are delivered over the Internet. This disruption is a major challenge for Service Providers and Independent Software Vendors when creating new services and software applications for the Cloud. BonFIRE offers a federated, multi-site cloud testbed to support large-scale testing of applications, services and systems. This is achieved by federating geographically distributed, heterogeneous clouds testbeds where each exposes unique configuration and/or features while giving to the experimenters (users) an homogeneous way to interact with the facility. All those testbeds are controlled by a central set of services commonly denominated “Broker”. Additionally, BonFIRE is federated with different network facilities like the Virtual Wall, FEDERICA and AutoBAHN to provide high-level interfaces to network control functionality, in order to simulate diverse network QoS scenarios, enabling vertical federation.

Resources Description, Selection, Reservation and Verification on a Large-Scale Testbed

The management of resources on testbeds, including their description, reservation and verification, is a challenging issue, especially on of large scale testbeds such as those used for research on High Performance Computing or Clouds. In this paper, we present the solution designed for the Grid’5000 testbed in order to: (1) provide users with an in-depth and machine-parsable description of the testbed’s resources; (2) enable multi-criteria selection and reservation of resources using a HPC resource manager; (3) ensure that the description of the resources remains accurate.

Using GASP for Collaborative Interaction within 3D Virtual Worlds

In this paper, we present GASP, a General Animation and Simulation Platform, whose purpose is to animate autonomous or user-driven agents, and we explain how it can be used for Collaborative Virtual Reality. First, we explain its architecture, based on the notion of simulation objects (or agents) associated with a calculation part (the behavior). Then we describe how it is possible to distribute efficiently our agents upon a network in order to share the amount of calculation between several computers. Finally, as the visualization of a simulation is also a simulation object, we show that our architecture allows us to distribute several visualizations upon a network to share a 3D interactive simulation between several users.