The Discovery Initiative

Discover what could happen beyond the Clouds !

An Open-Science Initiative aiming at implementing a fully decentralized IaaS manager

The Discovery initiative aims at overcoming the main limitations of the traditional server-centric cloud solutions by revising the OpenStack software in order to make it natively cooperative.

Overview

To accommodate the ever-increasing demand for Utility Computing (UC) resources, while taking into account both energy and economical issues, the current trend consists in building larger and larger Data Centers in a few strategic locations. Although such an approach enables UC providers to cope with the actual demand while continuing to operate UC resources through centralized software system, it is far from delivering sustainable and efficient UC infrastructures for future needs.

The DISCOVERY initiative aims at exploring a new way of operating Utility Computing (UC) resources by leveraging any facilities available through the Internet in order to deliver widely distributed platforms that can better match the geographical dispersal of users as well as the ever increasing demand. Referred as Fog/Edge Computing, this paradigm shift is dictated by technological advances in the capacity and capabilities of both mobile networks and end-user devices, along with requirements for improved QoS and growing user concern and awareness of trust and privacy issues. Among the obstacles to the adoption of this model is the development of a convenient and powerful IaaS system capable of managing a significant number of remote data-centers in a unified way.

To achieve this goal, the consortium is composed of experts in research areas such as large-scale infrastructure management systems, network and P2P algorithms. Moreover two key network operators, namely Orange and RENATER, the French NREN, are involved in the project.

By deploying and using resources directly available in the network, our ultimate vision is to make possible to host/operate a large part of the Internet by its internal structure itself: A scalable set of resources delivered by any computing facilities forming the Internet, starting from the larger hubs operated by ISPs, government and academic institutions, to any idle resources that may be provided by end-users.

Preliminary Publications

  1. Adrien Lebre, Anthony Simonet, and Anne-Cécile Orgerie. Deploying Distributed Cloud Infrastructures: Who and at What Cost?. In Proceedings of the fifth IEEE International Workshop on Cloud Computing Interclouds, Multiclouds, Federations, and Interoperability, 2016, InterCloud 2016 Berlin, May 2016.

  2. Adrien Lebre, Jonathan Pastor, and The Discovery consortium. The DISCOVERY Initiative - Overcoming Major Limitations of Traditional Server-Centric Clouds by Operating Massively Distributed IaaS Facilitiese. In Inria Research Report, France, Sept 2015.

  3. Adrien Lebre, Jonathan Pastor, Marin Bertier, Frédéric Desprez, Jonathan Rouzaud-Cornabas, Cédric Tedeschi, Paolo Anedda, Gianluigi Zanetti, Ramon Nou, Toni Cortes, Etienne Rivière, Thomas Ropars. Beyond The Cloud, How Should Next Generation Utility Computing Infrastructures Be Designed?. Inria Research Report 8348 . An extended version has been published as a book chapter in Cloud Computing: Challenges, Limitations and R&D Solutions, Springer Book Keyword(s): Utility Computing, Distributed Cloud Computing, IaaS, Efficiency, Sustainability.

  4. Adrien Lebre, Paolo Anedda, Massimo Gaggero, and Flavien Quesnel. DISCOVERY, Beyond the Clouds - DIStributed and COoperative framework to manage Virtual EnviRonments autonomicallY: a prospective study. In Virtualization for High Performance Cloud Computing workshop (colocated with EUROPAR 2011), Bordeaux, France, August 2011.

OpenStack Related

  1. Javier Rojas Balderrama, and Matthieu Simonin Scalability and Locality Awarness of Remote Procedure Calls: An Experimental Study in Edge Infrastructures Proceeding of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom) 2018, Dec 2018. Keyword(s): RPC, MOM, OpenStack, reproductible research, performance evaluation, RabbitMQ, Apache Qpid Dispatch Router

  2. Ronan-Alexandre Cherrueau, Adrien Lebre, João Monteiro Soare, Dimitri Pertin, and Fetahi Wuhib Edge Computing Resource Management System: a Critical Building Block! Initiating the debate via OpenStack Proceeding of the 1th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing (HotEdge 2018), July 2018. Keyword(s): OpenStack, Architecture, Requirements, Distributed Shared Data-Bases, API.

  3. Ronan-Alexandre Cherrueau, Matthieu Simonin, Alexandre Van Kempen, EnosStack: A LAMP-like stack for the experimenter. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications Workshop (CNERT 2018), April 2018. Keyword(s): OpenStack, reproducibility, performance evaluations.

  4. Jad Darrous, Shadi Ibrahim, Amelie Chi Zhou, and Christian Perez Nitro: Network-Aware Virtual Machine Images Management in Geo-Distributed Clouds. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID) 2018, May 2018. Keyword(s): VM Image repository, Glance, deduplication, geo-distribution.

  5. Hélène Coullon, Christian Perez and Dimitri Pertin. Production Deployment Tools for IaaSes: an Overall Model and Survey. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud) 2017, August 2017. Keyword(s): Deployment, IaaS, Model, Openstack, Survey

  6. Ronan-Alexandre Cherrueau, Dimitri Pertin, Anthony Simonet, Adrien Lebre and Matthieu Simonin. Toward an Holistic Framework for Conducting Scientific Evaluations of OpenStack. Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID) 2017, May 2017. Keyword(s): OpenStack, Performance evaluations, Reproducible research

  7. Adrien Lebre, Jonathan Pastor, Anthony Simonet and Frederic Desprez. Revising OpenStack to Operate Fog/Edge Computing Infrastructures. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) 2017, April 2017. Keyword(s): OpenStack, Nova, P2P, Key Value Store, Redis

  8. Adrien Lebre, Jonathan Pastor and Frederic Desprez. A Ring to Rule Them All - Revising OpenStack Internals to Operate Massively Distributed Clouds: The Discovery Initiative - Where Do We Are ?. Inria Technical Report, RT-0489, April 2016. Keyword(s): OpenStack, Nova, P2P, Key Value Store, Redis

  9. Ayoub Bousselmi, Jean Francois Peltier, Abdelhadi Chari. Experiments Towards an Openstack-based Massively Distributed Cloud Operating System. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN 2016), Berlin, Germany, Nov 2016. Keyword(s): OpenStack, Neutron, software architecture.

Scheduler/Placement Related

  1. Jad Darrous, Thomas Lambert, and Shadi Ibrahim. On the Importance of Container Image Placement for Service Provisioning in the Edge. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCN 2019), Valencia, Spain, pages XX-XX, July 2019. Keyword(s): Fog, Edge, Container image, Service provisioning, placement.

  2. Farah Ait Salaht, Frederic Desprez, Adrien Lebre, Charles Prudh'Homme and Mohamed Abderrahim. Service Placement in Fog Computing Using Constraint Programming. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2019), Milan, Italy, July 2019. Keyword(s): Fog, Edge, Constraint Programming, placement, cloud computing, scheduling.

  3. Ye Xia, Xavier Etchevers, Loic Letondeur, Adrien Lebre, Thierry Coupaye, and Frederic Desprez Combining Heuristics to Optimize and Scale the Placement of IoT Applications in the Fog. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE/ACM Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), Zurich, Switzeland, Dec 2018. Keyword(s): Fog, Edge, Constraint Programming, placement, cloud computing, scheduling.

  4. Adrien Lebre, Jonathan Pastor and Mario Südholt. VMPlaceS: A Generic Tool to Investigate and Compare VM Placement Algorithms. In Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Euro-Par (Euro-Par 2015), volume xxx of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vienna, Austria, pages XX-XX, August 2015. Springer-Verlag. Keyword(s): virtualization, cloud computing, scheduling, simulation, SimGrid.

  5. Flavien Quesnel, Daniel Balouek, and Adrien Lebre. Deploying and Scheduling Thousands of Virtual Machines on Hundreds of Nodes Distributed Geographically. In IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2013) (colocated with CCGRID 2013), Netherlands, May 2013.

  6. Flavien Quesnel, Adrien Lebre, Jonathan Pastor, Mario Südholt, and Daniel Balouek. Advanced Validation of the DVMS Approach to Fully Distributed VM Scheduling. In ISPA' 13: The 11th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications, Melbourne, Australia, July 2013. Keyword(s): virtualization, distributed infrastructures, dynamic scheduling, multi-agent systems, event-based systems, cooperative systems, autonomous systems, scalability, reactivity.

  7. Flavien Quesnel. Toward Cooperative Management of Large-scale Virtualized Infrastructures : the Case of Scheduling. THESIS, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, February 2013. Keyword(s): virtualization, distributed infrastructures, dynamic scheduling, multi-agent systems, event-based systems, cooperative systems, autonomous systems, scalability, reactivity.

  8. Flavien Quesnel, Adrien Lebre, and Mario Südholt. Cooperative and Reactive Scheduling in Large-Scale Virtualized Platforms with DVMS. In Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, pp XX, December 2012. Keyword(s): virtualization, Cluster/Grid/Cloud computing, dynamic and preemptive scheduling, consolidation, migration.

  9. Flavien Quesnel and Adrien Lebre. Cooperative Dynamic Scheduling of Virtual Machines in Distributed Systems. In 6th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing, volume 7156 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Bordeaux, France, pages 457-466, August 2011. Springer-Verlag. Keyword(s): virtualization, cloud computing, scheduling, cooperative system, autonomic system, event-based system, quality of service, scalability, reactivity.

Locality aware overlays

  1. Genc Tato, Marin Bertier, Etienne Riviere and Cedric Tedeschi. ShareLatex on the Edge: Evaluation of the Hybrid Core/Edge Deployment of a Microservices-based Application. In Proceedings of the Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets workshop (MECC 2018), Rennes, France Dec 2018. Keyword(s): overlay, discovery, P2P.

  2. Genc Tato, Marin Bertier, and Cedric Tedeschi. Koala: Towards Lazy and Locality-Aware Overlays for Decentralized Clouds. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Fog and Edge Computing (ICFEC 2018), Washington, USA May 2018. Keyword(s): overlay, discovery, P2P.

  3. Genc Tato, Marin Bertier, and Cedric Tedeschi. Designing Overlay Networks for Decentralized Clouds. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on the Future of Cloud Computing and Cloud Services (FutureCloud 2017), Hong-Kong, China Dec 2017. Keyword(s): overlay, discovery, P2P.

  4. Jonathan Pastor, Marin Bertier, Frédéric Desprez, Adrien Lebre, Flavien Quesnel and Cedric Tedeschi. Locality-aware Cooperation in Distributed IaaS Infrastructures. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Euro-Par (Euro-Par 2014), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Porto, Portugal, August 2014. Springer-Verlag. Keyword(s): virtualization, cloud computing, cooperative system, overlay, vivaldi, reactivity.

Energy Related

  1. Ehsan Ahvar, Anne-Cecile Orgerie, and Adrien Lebre. Estimating Energy Consumption of Cloud, Fog and Edge Computing Infrastructures. In IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing Journal, March 2019. Keyword(s): virtualization, Keywords: energy-efficiency, cloud computing, fog, edge, distributed infrastructures.

  2. Ismael Cuadrado Cordero, Anne-Cécile Orgerie and Christine Morin. GRaNADA: A Network-Aware and Energy-Efficient PaaS Cloud Architecture. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom 2015), Sydney, Australia, December 2015. Keywords: energy-efficiency, cloud computing, distributed infrastructures.

  3. Frédéric Desprez, Shadi Ibrahim, Adrien Lebre, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Jonathan Pastor and Anthony Simonet. Energy-Aware Massively Distributed Cloud Facilities: the DISCOVERY Initiative. Poster in Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom 2015), Sydney, Australia, December 2015. Keywords: energy-efficiency, cloud computing, distributed infrastructures.

Monitoring Related

  1. Mohamed Abderrahim, Karine Guillouard, Meryem Ouzzif, Jérôme Francois, Adrien Lebre, Charles Prud'homme, and Xavier Lorca. Efficient Resource Allocation for Multi-tenant Monitoring of Edge Infrastructures Proceedings of the Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP 2019), Feb 2019. Keyword(s): Monitoring Tools, Fog, Edge, Placement.

  2. Mohamed Abderrahim, Karine Guillouard, Meryem Ouzzif, Jérôme Francois and Adrien Lebre. An Holistic Monitoring Service for Fog/Edge Infrastructures: a Prospective Analysis Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud) 2017, August 2017. Keyword(s): Monitoring Tools, Cluster, Grid, Clouds, Edge, Survey

Security

  1. Mohammad-Mahdi BAZM, Marc Lacoste, Mario Südholt, Jean-Marc Menaud. Side-Channels Beyond the Cloud Edge : New Isolation Threats and Solutions Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security in Networking Conference (CSNet) 2017, Oct 2017. Keyword(s): Security, Fog, Edge

Since July 2015, the Discovery initiative is mainly supported through the Inria Project Labs program and the I/O labs, a joint lab between Inria and Orange Labs.

The Discovery Consortium, © 2014-2017