Project description

The VeRDi project is funded by the French region Pays De La Loire where Nantes is located. VeRDi is an acronym for Verified Reconfiguration Driven by execution. It aims at addressing distributed software reconfiguration in an efficient and verified way. Configuring complex distributed software for heterogeneous distributed infrastructures is a non-trivial and technical task, often called deployment. A deployment, because of its error-prone and complex nature, needs to be automated in an efficient and verified manner to guarantee its behavior.

This is the work under research by a few members of the STACK research group, a joint team of Inria and LS2N located in Nantes. However, both distributed infrastructures and software are nowadays evolving towards more dynamic behaviors. For instance, in Edge Computing infrastructures, small computational devices frequently enter or leave the network because of their mobility or because of failures, thus creating a need for system re-configuration over time. Other examples are IoT, Smart-* or services-oriented applications composed of many different modules that evolve through time according to dynamic information.

If ad-hoc specific solutions have already emerged, both in production and research, to address a subpart of possible reconfigurations, there is an active research trend to address reconfiguration expressivity and execution in a generic fashion applicable to most software reconfiguration cases. Moreover, given the high frequency of reconfigurations and the high availability required by service-oriented applications, reconfigurations have to be as efficient as possible which is difficult to address for large-scale infrastructures, applications and systems.

Project objectives

The aim of the VeRDi project is to build an argued disruptive view of the problem. To do so we want to validate the work already performed on the deployment in the team and extend it to reconfiguration.