ARC BROCCOLI

The goal of the BROCCOLI ARC project is to design a platform for describing, deploying, executing, observing, administrating, and reconfiguring large-scale component-based software architectures, in particular for building discrete event simulation applications. Both the platform and the applications considered are based on software components and architecture description languages, and in particular on the Fractal component model. Therefore, the main issue addressed in this project is the scalability of such component-based architectures based on Fractal. Indeed, by allowing Fractal to scale-up to millions of components running on thousand of nodes, our aim is to establish the foundations of a massively distributed component-based simulator based on Fractal. However, the Broccoli road is paved of ambushes: existing ADLs are insufficient to describe very large architectures, the numerous data-flows and statistics generated by observations need smart context management policies, and distributed simulation is a long studied but still challenging problem, especially when combined with AOP techniques and Fractal special features such as shared components.

Broccoli’s leaves (partnership)

This project establishes a collaboration between the 3 following teams:

• INRIA Futurs - ADAM project-team
  • Philippe Merle, Lionel Seinturier
• INRIA Sophia antipolis - MASCOTTE project-team
  • Olivier Dalle (project head), Judicael Ribault
• Télécom SudParis - ACMES team
  • Denis Conan, Sébastien Leriche

Broccoli’s roots (softs)

Broccoli aims at integrating and scaling up to unprecedented size all the following (existing) pieces:

• The Fractal Component Model
• The Fractal Deployment Framework (ADAM)
• The Fractal-AOKell implementation (ADAM)
• The COSMOS (COntext entitieS coMpositiOn and Sharing) Framework (ACMES)
• The Open Simulation Architecture (OSA) (Mascotte)

Broccoli’s core (news & actions)

• Oct 27–31, 2008: D. Conan & S. Leriche stay with ADAM team in Lille.
  • O. Dalle and J. Ribault will join a couple days for a progress meeting.
• Oct 1st, 2008: Journees INRIA ARC
  • Le poster au format A0 (PDF, 2.08MiB - PNG, 2.03MiB - SVG, 141KiB - Zipped EPS, 2.81MiB)
  • Le transparent de presentation (PDF, 596 KiB - PPT, 636 KiB)
• Sept 8–12, 2008: D. Conan & S. Leriche stay with MASCOTTE team in Sophia Antipolis
  • Identification of COSMOS usage patterns (PDF)
  • Presentation of a large scale case study system (P2P storage system)
• Jul 1–4, 2008: Dalle & Ribault stay with ADAM team in Lille
  • Work on a common paper
• Jun 29, 2008: OSA v0.4 released on INRIA forge
• Jun 19–20, 2008: Progress meeting in Paris (SupTelecom)
  • ACMES presents ongoing work on COSMOS using FODA specification (PDF)
  • Brainstorm session on using FODA for all the project
  • MASCOTTE presents OSA v0.4
  • Discussion about project future actions
• May 26-Jun 6, 2008: Ribault stays with ACME team in Paris
• Feb 26–27, 2008: Kick-off meeting in Sophia Antipolis.
  • Each team presents its part of the jigsaw and ongoing work to other teams
    • COSMOS.pdf (ACMES)
  • Brainstorm discussion about Fractal ADL weaknesses, strengths, and possible evolutions
  • Roadmap

Roadmap for 2nd year

• Specification of a project use case
  • P2P Storage application (Leader: MASCOTTE)
• Implementation of the prototype
  • Implementation of the use case spec. (Leader: MASCOTTE)
  • Instrumentation of use case appli (Leader: ACMES, Contributor: MASCOTTE)
• Experiments on prototype
  • Coupling with COSMOS
    • Control Engineering (embeding control in membranes) (Leader: MASCOTTE, Contributors: ADAM, ACMES)
  • Instrumentation of OSA use case with COSMOS (Leader MASCOTTE+ Contributor ACMES)
  • Deployment on GRID with FDF and FractalADL (Leader: ADAM, Contributors: MASCOTTE, ACMES)
• Experiments on Fractal modelling
  • Test & Developpement FracToy (Leader: ADAM)
  • Validation of FracToy on OSA & COSMOS (Leader: ADAM, Contributors: MASCOTTE & ACMES)

Planned actions: Workshop in June with French community working on related topics.