Research Internships 2005-2006

Reconfiguration primitives and properties on the behaviour of a component system

General context

The general context of this framework is components models. Our team is highly involved in the design of a Grid Component Model (GCM), which consists in a Grid-oriented extension of the Fractal component model.

In general in component programming, but even more specifically in distributed and Grid computing, components need to be highly adaptative, a great part of adaptativeness relies on reconfiguration of component systems, i.e. dynamically (during execution) bind, unbind, add and remove components.

Fractal defines "basic/predefined" controllers that should be present in most of Fractal components. We are interested here  in binding, life-cycle, and content controllers (they allow to bind/unbind components, start/stop components, add/remove components inside another one). The primitives proposed in Fractal are sufficient for expressing any reconfiguration, but they are rather low-level.

The Oasis team is developping a distributed implementation of Fractal (over ProActive), together with model checking tools adapted to those components systems

Objectives
 
The objective of this internship is to design a higher level of reconfiguration primitives allowing to achieve complex operations, but also to trigger such operations on specific events.

This internship consists in designing a set of high-level primitives (e.g., replace, add and bind, unbind and remove, duplicate, recursively add, ...) for reconfiguration ensuring more correctness properties than the Fractal ones, and more autonomicity. By providing higher level of primitives, we want to help the programmer to design safe scenario. For example a replacement seems safer and easier to verify than the equivalent sequence (stop+unbind+remove+add+bind+start) that simulates it in Fractal.

From this point, several objectives can be envisioned:

The objective of the internship is not necessarily to fulfill all the preceding goals.


Potential advisors :  Ludovic Henrio and Eric Madelaine  and Francoise Baude
Phone : 04 92 38 71 64 Email :   Ludovic.Henrio@inria.fr
Team :  OASIS  (INRIA Sophia Antipolis -- I3S -- CNRS)



Prerequisite : Some knowledge in Object-oriented languages, distributed programming, formal models.

Internship location:
       Sophia Antipolis, between Nice and Cannes, France


A few internal references