fOSSa 2011 Conference

 OSS Trends: What's coming next?

Responsible: INRIA – D2T – Bernard Espiau & Stephane Ribas

Debates between Google & Oracle demonstrate the crucial role that open source software is playing nowadays in information & communication technologies. At the same time, looking at the major software organizations only, the evolution of open source software appears incomplete, since this model is spreading rapidly on an ever-growing number of territories. Arduino project, which is open source applied to hardware, is a clear example.

During this session, speakers will share their knowledge & vision about future OSS technologies:

• Where the dyke has give in?
• What are the new territories?

Speakers will give a sample of what’s actually happening & debate about the future…

Building an Opensource based  HPC stack today

Where do we stand today? (pdf)

• Senior Architect in HPC Competence Centre is in charge of advanced technology prospective to prepare Bull exascale offer
• She participated as an Ecosystem Expert in EESI: European Exascale Software Initiative (2010-2011)
• Until 2010, she was in charge of Software architecture of Bull HPC offer and of the Petaflop CEA-BULL research program
• She obtained her PhD in geology & a Master of Artificial Intelligence (CERICS) 

Building an Opensource based  HPC stack today

BULL has for some years heavily involved in developing an open source stack for HPC including in models of parallel programming (MPI), parallel file systems (Lustre), managers of works (Slurm), the development tools provided in the stack (debuggers, profilers), tools for cluster management, …

This talk will summarize  the issues to build an HPC opensource stack today and will introduced new Open source challenge to deal with the target of exascale computing at 2020 timeframe.

• David Loureiro is CEO of SysFera.
• After studying applied mathematics at École Polytechnique Universitaire de Lyon (EPU Lyon, formerly ISTIL), he worked in Inria project-team Graal, located at Laboratoire de l’Informatique du Parallélisme (Parallel Computing Science Lab), on the DIET software and its management and administration tools.
• Following that, he took management courses at École de Management Lyon (EM Lyon). David, Eddy Caron and Frédéric Desprez founded the SysFera company in March 2010, in order to develop and distribute SysFera-DS, an open-source software distribution dedicated to the management of heterogeneous and distributed HPC resources in a private cloud fashion.
• SysFera works on industrializing and extending DIET, as well as on increasing its presence in the open-source community, notably by integrating it into Linux distributions such as Debian.

SysFera-DS: industrializing an open source research middleware
for distributed resources

SysFera develops software for the management of IT infrastructures as a hybrid Cloud, in the domain of HPC. The company has been created in 2010 by an engineer and two researchers around software developed for about 10 years by an Inria team.

Designed to demonstrate theories of distributed scheduling or data management, this software suite was tested and adopted by the Téléthon in 2007, to manage the HPC infrastructure of its Décrypthon project.

This choice revealed an actual industrial demand and was the starting point of the company's creation process. This is the story of the long road to industrialization…

• Oscar NIYONKURU is a Java/J2E senior architect (Sun Certified Enterprise Architect), & is a very active player for several years within the SOA community in Africa.
• He acts for innnovation, promotion & development of new technologies in Africa, by an active participation to networks & communities, such as AfroCIO (network of the African CIOs), FOSSFA (Free Software and Open Source Foundation For Africa), by publishing articles in the CIO-MAG magazine (the major IT magazine in the French speaking countries in Africa, relaying the word of European CIOs).
• Before focusing on Africa, Oscar was SOA architect & project leader for major projects in France within organizations such as Ministère des Finance, Ministère de l'Intérieur, Société Générale.
• Here is this experience that he brings to African CIOs & Universities, promoting the usage of OSS in the research area (ongoing R&D partnership with universities & schools in Rwanda, Senegal and Burundi), for e-government initiatives (ongoing Proof-on-Concept in Burundi for the National Army, the National Police and the Ministry of Health).

Open Source trend in Africa

abstract

• Alain Boulze has 25 years experience in information system design and architecture, as well as in project management.

• From 2004 to 2010, he's been team leader at the INRIA labs, Grenoble and lead and worked on several Open Source R&D projects and communities (Eclipse, OW2, fOSSa).

• He's then founded EasiFab out of this context in order to develop and provide online services to help streamlining IT production, and especially tooling to manage service lifecycle and support business process improvement.

Open Source trend in Africa

During the last years, Africa significantly moved forward in the development of IT infrastructures and activities, contributing to tremendous opportunities for economic progress and improvements in living conditions for African people.

At the same time, major information technology actors and organizations, and leading enterprises’ CIOs as well made a great effort to improve the organization of their collaboration across the whole continent, in order to spread information and communication technologies, and share knowledge about the crucial role of those technologies and their numerous applications for innovation and economical development.

During this session, speakers will explore new territories to be developed across Africa (ubiquity, mobility, cloud, agility, IT and business architecture,) and focus on the potential role and contribution of the open source model to such new challenges.
 

• Pierre-Guillaume Raverdy received his PhD in Computer Science from Pierre & Marie Curie University in 1996.
•  After a post-doc at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo doing adaptive systems research, he joined Sony Electronics in California in 1998 to work on home networking and mobile multimedia.
• After returning to France, he joined the INRIA ARLES research team in 2004 and participated to various projects on mobile middleware and SOA.
• In 2008, he took a position at INRIA's Technological Development Department overseeing collaborative projects in the INRIA's research centers.
• He left INRIA in 2011 to start Ambientic to market mobile midleware and collaborative apps in the business world. 
• He is a founding member and CEO of Ambientic.
   

Mobile Citizens, Personal Clouds & Social Aspects

Mobile, Cloud and Social have seen a tremendous growth in the last five years. The popularity of smartphones and mobile apps is now enabling the convergence of these domains and the emergence of Personal Cloud computing. The goals of Personal clouds are to give access to all personal data at any given moment, let users organize and mine data from any online source, and interact with others based on actual relationships.

In this presentation, I will discuss the issues and enabling technologies related to the development of mobile apps for the Personal Cloud.

• In the early 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, and then researched a PhD in tribology there.  
• In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Maths Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry.  He then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran
  that for four years.  
• After that he took up a lectureship in manufacturing in Bath's Engineering Department, where he is now a senior lecturer.
• His areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to
  manufacturing, and biomimetics.  
• His main work in biomimetics is on self-copying machines.
   

RepRap – Manufacturing for the Masses

Look at your computer setup. Imagine you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make lots of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

This talk will be about RepRap – the Replicating Rapid-prototyper.

This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic.  This technology already existed before RepRap, but the cheapest proprietary machine then would have set you back EUR 15,000. And it wasn't even designed so that it could make itself.  So what the RepRap team have done is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about EUR 400).  That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world.  The RepRap machine is being distributed entirely free to everyone using open-source – so, if you have one, you can make another and give it to a friend…