My name is Xavier Besseron and I have a PhD degree in Computer Science. I am now working at the University of Luxembourg.
I did my PhD at Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG) -- INRIA in the MOAIS project. It deals with Fault Tolerance and Dynamic Reconfiguration for High Performance Computing. My supervisors were Thierry Gautier and Denis Trystram. I defended my PhD on April 2010.
I worked on the Kaapi middleware and I ran my experiments on the Grid'5000 platform. I have also participated in the IVth and Vth Grid Plugtests.
Title: Fault Tolerance and Dynamic Reconfiguration for Large Scale Distributed Applications
Abstract:
This work deals with high performance computing on large scale platforms such as computing grids. Computing grids are characterized by (1) frequent changes in execution context and, especially, by (2) a high failure probability caused by the large number of components. Running an application efficiently in such an environment requires to consider these parameters.
Our research work is based on the abstract representation of the application as a data flow graph from the parallel and distributed programming model Athapascan/Kaapi. This abstract representation is used to provide solutions for (1) dynamic reconfiguration and (2) fault tolerance issues.
These contributions are evaluated through the Kaapi and X-Kaapi software on the Grid'5000 computing platform.
Keywords: Parallel computing, Grid computing, Dynamic adaptation and reconfiguration, Fault tolerance, Data flow graph.
You can find a list of my publications here.
During my PhD, I worked on the Kaapi middleware.
Kaapi is a C++ library that allows to execute multithreaded computation with data flow synchronization between threads. The library is able to schedule fine/medium size grain program on distributed machine. The data flow graph is dynamic (unfold at runtime). Target architectures are clusters of multiprocessor machines.
My main contributions to Kaapi are
Grid'5000 is the French national grid for research purpose. It counts more than 5000 cores distributed over 9 sites.
During my PhD, I ran most of my experiments for Kaapi on the Grid'5000 platform.
Here is my Grid'5000 User report
I have participated in the IVth and Vth Grid Plugtests contests. These contests allowed to show the great performances of the Kaapi middleware.
From October 2006 to September 2009, I was a teaching assistant for the Université Joseph Fourier.
I taught Algorithmic and C programming under UNIX environment in DLST to undergraduate students.
Email : <xavier besseron (a) imag fr>