Book review: Spirit of rebellion. Labor and religion in the new cotton south

International audienceThis article provides formal definitions characterizing well-formed composition of components in order to guarantee their safe deployment and execution. Our work focuses on the structural aspects of component composition; it puts together most of the concepts common to many component models, but never formalized as a whole. Our formalization characterizes correct component architectures made of functional and non-functional aspects, both structured as component assemblies. Interceptor chains can be used for a safe and controlled interaction between the two aspects. Our well-formed components guarantee a set of properties ensuring that the deployed component system has a correct architecture and can run safely. Finally, those definitions constitute the formal basis for our Eclipse-based environment for the development and specification of component-based applications

Experiments with distributed Model-Checking of group-based applications

National audienceGroup-based distributed systems are specific cases of distributed applications with a parameterized topology. They are naturally modelled by systems with a very large state space. We encode the behavioural semantics of group-based applications using the intermediate format FIACRE. We have experimented with model-checking of such systems, using the CADP verification toolset, and in particular the distributor tool. This allowed us to generate very large but finite state-space on the PacaGrid cloud infrastructure. We have then been able to compare different techniques for generating state-spaces, and experiment with different sizes of the modelled system and of the experimental platform

Timed-pNets: a communication behavioural semantic model for distributed systems

International audienceThis paper presents an approach to build a communicationbehavioural semantic model for heterogeneousdistributed systems that include synchronous and asynchronouscommunications. Since each node of such systemhas its own physical clock, it brings the challenges of correctlyspecifying the system time constraints. Based on thelogical clocks proposed by Lamport, and CCSL proposed byAoste team in INRIA, as well as pNets from Oasis teamin INRIA, we develop timed-pNets to model communicationbehaviours for distributed systems. Timed-pNets are treestyle hierarchical structures. Each node is associated with atimed specification which consists of a set of logical clocksand some relations on clocks. The leaves are representedby timed-pLTSs. Non-leaf nodes (called timed-pNets nodes)are synchronisation devices that synchronize the behavioursof subnets (these subnets can be leaves or non-leaf nodes).Both timed-pLTSs and timed-pNets nodes can be translatedto timed specifications. All these notions and methods are illustratedon a simple use-case of car insertion from the areaof intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In the end theTimeSquare tool is used to simulate and check the validityof our model

Timed-pNets: A Communication Behavioural Semantic Model for Distributed Systems (extended version)

This paper presents an approach to build a communication behavioural semantic model for heterogeneous distributed systems that include synchronous and asynchronous communications. Since each node of such system has its own physical clock, it brings the challenges of correctly specifying the system's time constraints. Based on the logical clocks proposed by Lamport and CCSL proposed by Aoste team in INRIA as well as pNets from Oasis team in INRIA, we develop timed-pNets to model communication behaviour for distributed systems. Timed-pNets are tree style hierarchical structures. Each node is associated with a timed specification which consists of a set of logical clocks and some relations on clocks. The leaves are represented by timed-pLTSs and non-leaf nodes are represented by timed-pNets including some holes which are filled by leaves or non-leaf nodes. Both timed-pLTSs and timed-pNets node can be translated to timed specifications. All these notions and methods are illustrated on a simple use-case of car insertion from the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and then TimeSquare tool is used to simulate and check the validity of our model.Cet article présente une nouvelle approche pour définir un modéle sémantique comportemental pour des systémes distribués comportant des communications aussi bien synchrones qu'asynchrones. Chaque site dans ce genre de systéme ayant sa propre horloge, définir correctement les contraintes temporelles globales du systéme est un défi. Á partir des concepts d'horloges virtuelles de Lamport, du langage CCSL introduit par l'équipe AOSTE d'INRIA, et du modéle pNets de l'équipe OASIS, nous développons notre modéle Timed-pNets pour exprimer les comportements et la communication de ces systémes distribués. Les Timed-pNets sont des structures hiérarchiques arborescentes. Á chaque noeud est associée une {\sl spécification temporelle} composée d'un ensemble d'horloges et de relations entre ces horloges. Les noeuds feuilles sont representés par des Timed-pLTSs (systémes de transitions paramétrés temporisés), et les autres noeuds sont soit recursivement des Timed-pNets, soit des trous (Holes) destinés á être remplis ultérieurement par des Timed-pNets. Nous définissons des algorithmes permettant de synthétiser la spécification temporelle des Timed-pLTSs et des Timed-pNets. Toutes ces notions sont illustrées sur un exemple de conduite automatisée de véhicules, issue du monde des systémes de transport intelligents (ITS); finalement nous utilisons le logiciel TimeSquare pour simuler notre modéle et en vérifier la validit

Planning Live-Migrations to Prepare Servers for Maintenance

International audienceIn a virtualized data center, server maintenance is a common but still critical operation. A prerequisite is indeed to relocate elsewhere the Virtual Machines (VMs) running on the production servers to prepare them for the maintenance. When the maintenance focuses several servers, this may lead to a costly relocation of several VMs so the migration plan must be chose wisely. This however implies to master numerous human, technical, and economical aspects that play a role in the design of a quality migration plan. In this paper, we study migration plans that can be decided by an operator to prepare for an hardware upgrade or a server refresh on multiple servers. We exhibit performance bottleneck and pitfalls that reduce the plan efficiency. We then discuss and validate possible improvements deduced from the knowledge of the environment peculiarities

Scheduling Live-Migrations for Fast, Adaptable and Energy-Efficient Relocation Operations

International audienceEvery day, numerous VMs are migrated inside a datacenter to balance the load, save energy or prepare production servers for maintenance. Despite VM placement problems are carefully studied, the underlying migration scheduler rely on vague adhoc models. This leads to unnecessarily long and energy-intensive migrations. We present mVM, a new and extensible migration scheduler. mVM takes into account the VM memory workload and the network topology to estimate precisely the migration duration and take wiser scheduling decisions. mVM is implemented as a plugin of BtrPlace and can be customized with additional scheduling constraints to finely control the migrations. Experiments on a real testbed show mVM outperforms schedulers that cap the migration parallelism by a constant to reduce the completion time. Besides an optimal capping, mVM reduces the migration duration by 20.4% on average and the completion time by 28.1%. In a maintenance operation involving 96 VMs to migrate between 72 servers, mVM saves 21.5% Joules against BtrPlace. Finally, its current library of 6 constraints allows administrators to address temporal and energy concerns, for example to adapt the schedule and fit a power budget

Memory and Network Aware Scheduling of Virtual Machine Migrations

International audienceLive-migration has become a common operation on virtualized infrastructures. Indeed, it is widely used by resource management algorithms to distribute the load between servers and to reduce energy consumption. Operators rely also on migrations to prepare production servers for critical maintenance by relocating their running VMs elsewhere. To apply new VM placement decisions, live-migrations must be scheduled by selecting for each migration the moment to start and the bandwidth to allocate. Long migrations violate SLAs and reduce the practical benefits of placement algorithms. The VMs should then be migrated as fast as possible. To do so, the migration scheduler must be able to predict accurately the migration durations and schedule them accordingly. Dynamic VM placement algorithms focus extensively on computing a placement of quality. Their practical reactivity is however lowered by restrictive assumptions that underestimate the migration durations. For example, Entropy supposes a non-blocking homogeneous network coupled with a null dirty page rate and we already demonstrated that the network topology but also the workload live memory usage are dominating factors. Recently, some migration models have been developed and integrated into simulators to evaluate VM placement algorithms properly. While these models reproduce migrations finely, they are only devoted to simulation purpose and not used to compute scheduling decisions. We propose here a migration scheduler that considers the network topology, the migration routes, the VM memory usage and the dirty page rates, to compute precise migration durations and infer better schedules. We implemented our scheduler on top of BtrPlace, an extensible version of Entropy that allows to enrich the scheduling decision capabilities through plug-ins. To assess the flexibility of our scheduler, we also implemented constraints to synchronize migrations, to establish precedence rules, to respect power budgets and an objective that minimizes energy consumption. We evaluated our model accuracy and its resulting benefits by executing migration scenarios on a real testbed including a blocking network, mixed VM memory workloads and collocation settings. Our model predicted the migration durations with a 94% accuracy at minimum and an absolute error of 1 second while BtrPlace vanilla was only 30% accurate. This gain of precision led to wiser scheduling decisions. In practice, the migrations completed on average 3.5 time faster as compared to an execution based on BtrPlace vanilla. Thanks to a better control of migrations and power-switching actions we also reduced the power consumption of a server decommissioning scenario according to different power budgets

Bringing Coq Into the World of GCM Distributed Applications

International audienceAmong all programming paradigms, component-based engineering stands as one of the most followed approaches for real world software devel- opment. Its emphasis on clean separation of concerns and reusability makes it appealing for both industrial and research purposes. The Grid Component Model (GCM) endorses this approach in the con- text of distributed systems by providing all the means to define, compose and dynamically reconfigure component-based applications. While structural re- configuration is one of the key features of GCM applications, this ability to evolve at runtime poses several challenges w.r.t reliability. In this paper we present Mefresa, a framework for reasoning on the struc- ture of GCM applications. This contribution comes in the form of a formal specification mechanized in the Coq Proof Assistant. Our aim is to demon- strate the benefits of interactive theorem proving for the reasoning on software architectures. We provide a configuration and reconfiguration language for the safe instantiation of distributed systems

Ordonnancement contrôlé de migrations à chaud

National audienceMigrer à chaud une machine virtuelle (VM) est une opération basique dans un centre de don-nées. Tous les jours, des VM sont migrées pour répartir la charge, économiser de l'énergie ou préparer la maintenance de serveurs en production. Bien que les problèmes de placement des VM soient beaucoup étudiés, on observe que la gestion des migrations permettant de transiter vers ces nouveaux placements reste un domaine de second plan. On observe alors des algo-rithmes de placement de qualité, couplés à des algorithmes d'ordonnancement prenant des décisions peu pertinentes causées par des hypothèses irréalistes. Nous présentons dans ce papier mVM, un ordonnanceur de migrations reposant sur un modèle précis du réseau et du protocole de migration à chaud. Cet ordonnanceur a été intégré en place de celui du gestionnaire de VM BtrPlace. Nos premières expérimentations montrent que les durées des migrations sont estimées à 1.5 secondes près. Cette précision a permis de calculer de meilleurs ordonnancements, réduisant la durée des migrations par 3.5 comparée à BtrPlace