Politehnica University of Bucharest (PUB) is the largest technical university in Romania (26,000 students, among which 1,500 with the Computer Science Department). The National Center for Information Technology (NCIT) is part of the PUB, within the Computer Science Department of PUB. The Center is dedicated to advanced and inter-disciplinary research. It includes several research and teaching laboratories in the fields of High-Performance Computing, Distributed Systems and Applications, E-Business and E-Government, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks.

The Distributed Systems and Grids team is part of the NCIT and its research is directed on large-scale distributed systems middleware and applications. The focus is on distributed system monitoring and control, evaluation of distributed system using modeling and simulation, resource management, meta-scheduling, web service-based and workflow-based scheduling. The team is actively involved in multiple international, European and national collaborative projects in the area of distributed computing. Below is a brief description of a few selected projects of PUB relevant for this proposal. They illustrate the high expertise acquired by the PUB Team in the specific area of large-scale distributed monitoring, a significant success factor for the proposed associated team.

• Coordinator: Valentin Cristea, Professor at PUB
• Team members involved: PUB

The KerData Team has been created on the 1st of July 2009 as a joint research team of Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique and École Normale Supérieure de Cachan - Antenne de Bretagne. It is strongly engaged in the process of becoming an INRIA project-team. KerData has been created by Luc Bougé, Professor at ENS Cachan - Antenne de Bretagne (team leader) and Gabriel Antoniu, Research Scientist at Inria - former members of the PARIS Project-Team.

KerData is focusing on Cloud storage for very large distributed data. It is addressing the challenges raised by today's data-oriented high-performance applications that exhibit the need to handle massive, non-structured data - BLOBs: binary large objects (in the order of terabytes) - stored in a large number (thousands to tens of thousands), accessed under heavy concurrency by a large number of clients (thousands to tens of thousands at a time) with a relatively fine access grain (on the order of megabytes). These challenges are investigated through the design, implementation and experimental validation of a generic data-sharing platform called BlobSeer. Among the applications targeted by the KerData Team, one class is particularly relevant for the work proposed for this project: service-based distributed applications executed in cloud environments.

• Coordinator: Gabriel Antoniu, Research Scientist at Inria
• Team members involved: KerData

The Myriads Project-Team from Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique research center aims at contributing to the programming of large-scale, parallel and distributed systems. It investigates new approaches to build software mechanisms that hide the complexity of programming computing infrastructures that are both parallel and distributed. Our contribution to the field can thus be summarized as follows: combining parallel and distributed processing whilst preserving performance and transparency.

The PARIS Project-Team has carried out research activities on the design and implementation of Grid-aware operating systems. It has designed and implemented Vigne, a system for large-scale dynamic Grids.

Since June 2006, Christine Morin has been the scientific coordinator of the XtreemOS European Integrated Project. The objective of the XtreemOS Project is to design, implement and promote a Linux-based Grid operating system providing a native virtual organization support. The research activities of the PARIS Project-Team in XtreemOS are focused on the design and implementation of a fault-tolerance service offering transparent checkpointing to Grid applications, on the design of virtual organization and security services, on the design and implementation of system services to manage virtualized infrastructures and on the design and implementation of LinuxSSI, leveraging Kerrighed SSI operating system for the cluster flavor of XtreemOS system.

The PARIS Project-Team has been involved in the Grid'5000 project since the beginning in 2003. Grid'5000 is an infrastructure distributed in 9 sites around France, for research in large-scale parallel and distributed systems.

• Coordinator: Christine Morin, Senior Research Scientist at Inria
• Team members involved: Myriads