The UNCONV associated team gathers together the PARIS team from INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique, the POP-ART team from INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes and the Insititute of Computing Technology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
UNCONV builds upon the observation that reliability of Grid Infrastructures do not yet reach the level at which it can be used for critical applications and programming Grids is very similar with what computer programmers faced before programming languages came in the light. Taking into consideration the increasing complexity of existing Grid infrastructures, it appears of prime importance to study novel approaches that will make possible the design of reliable Grid infrastructures and to provide a certain level of abstraction to enhance Grid programmer’s productivity.
Traditional Grid middleware has been constructed in a very conservative way, using only previously existing standards, in terms of resource management as well as for programming itself, and thus are very complicated and unlikely to success in the long term. The objective of UNCONV is to investigate disruptive and unconventional approaches in the design of Grid systems and Grid programming paradigms. UNCONV proposes to study how existing open-source operating systems could be extended to facilitate the design of reliable Grid infrastructures and to investigate a new programming paradigm based on the chemical metaphor.