Project : sardes
Section: Overall Objectives
Overall Objectives
Objectives.
The objective of the Sardes project is to develop concepts, methods, and tools to build distributed systems (including both infrastructures and applications) that are open, evolvable, and safe. The designers and developers of such systems are facing important challenges, among which scalability, administration, and quality of service. To respond to these challenges, the infrastructures and applications need to be adaptable. This may be achieved through reflexivity and component-based design.
The project has three main ambitions:
To identify architectural paradigms for the various aspects of adaptable distributed systems (naming, communications, resource management, fault tolerance, mobility); to elaborate the relevant design patterns and software frameworks, as well as programming and meta-programming models.
To develop software engineering techniques to build adaptable distributed systems, specially through the use of configurable components, reflexivity, and appropriate construction techniques (e.g. meta-programming and dynamic compilation).
To apply the concepts and techniques developed in the project to the prototyping of adaptable software infrastructures; to validate these concepts and techniques in various environments (clusters, large scale networks, embedded systems), and for various application domains (data management, multimedia, real time), with emphasis on scalability, administrability, and quality of service.
Organization and Collaborations.
The project is organized around two main activity domains: models and tools for distributed components; autonomous distributed systems management. The latter theme is taking an increasing importance. We have started a new project-wide activity whose aim is to design and implement an autonomic resource management system on a cluster, in order to ensure prescribed levels of availability and quality of service.
Sardes is involved in several industrial and international collaborations. It is active in the ObjectWeb consortium ( 8.2) dedicated to open source middleware. It is a partner of several European projects and networks: Mikado, Ozone, CoreGrid, Gorda (IST program) and Osmose (ITEA program). It participates in two projects funded by the national research network on software technologies (RNTL): Arcad and Inside. It collaborates with several industrial partners: Bull, France Telecom, Microsoft, ST MicroElectronics, and has close links with Scalagent, a technology startup created by former members of the project.
