Alain Tchana was born in 1985 in Nkongsamba, Cameroon. He studied there until 2008, where he obtained his master's degree in Networks and Multimedia Applications at the Computer Science Department of the University of Yaoundé I. After his internship at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT, in France), he started a PhD in the same laboratory under the supervision of Pr Daniel Hagimont. During his thesis, Alain Tchana worked on the design of orchestrators for the cloud. He obtained his PhD in 2011 and joined the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG, in France) under the supervision of Pr Noel De Palma. During his post-doctorate at LIG, Alain Tchana was interested in the optimization of benchmarking systems.
In 2013, Alain Tchana was recruited as Associate Professor at Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse where he joined the SEPIA team of IRIT. He focused his research on the field of operating systems and hypervisors. In 2015, Alain Tchana started a close collaboration with Cameroonian universities and more particularly with the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique de Yaoundé (ENSPY) in Cameroon. Since then, he has been a guest lecturer in the Computer Engineering department of ENSPY where he teaches Cloud and Virtualization. Alain Tchana has supervised about twenty students from ENSPY.
After the defense of his Habilitation to Supervise Research in 2017, Alain Tchana was recruited in 2018 at the University of Nice at the rank of Full Professor. Then in 2019, Alain Tchana was recruited to the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Lyon where he continues his research activities in the Laboratoire de l'Informatique pour le Parallélisme (LIP). Currently, Alain Tchana is in charge of a Systems research group composed of about five PhD students. He is also the head of the computer science department of ENS dLyon, co-chair of the LIP's parity committee, and member of the CNRS national committee.
Alain Tchana's work has been the subject of more than sixty articles published in prestigious international peer-reviewed conferences and journals (e.g., EuroSys). One of Alain Tchana's outstanding achievements is his ability to transmit the love of research to his PhD students. Indeed, all of the seven students he supervised are pursuing a research activity. Five of them have permanent positions in academia.
Alain Tchana is mainly interested in the following research topics: datacenter disaggregation, storage virtualization, virtualization of hardware features for virtualization, performance improvement, and securing applications. Simply, Alain Tchana is a Systems guy!
TGVM: Live Migration of Virtual Machines on Heterogenous Same ISA Processors. (workshop) SPMA 2022, colocated with EuroSys 2022.
Caleb Fonyuy-Asheri, Djob Mvondo, Fred Onanina, Alain Tchana.
Performance and design analysis of GiantVM, a distributed hypervisor. (workshop) SPMA 2022, colocated with EuroSys 2022.
Brice Teguia, Mohamed Karaoui, Alain Tchana.
Montsalvat: Intel SGX Shielding for GraalVM Native Images. Middleware (to appear) 2021.
Peterson Yuhala, Jämes Ménétrey, Pascal Felber, Valerio Schiavoni, Alain Tchana, Gaël Thomas, Hugo Guiroux, and Jean-Pierre Lozi.
Tell me when you are sleepy and what may wake you up! SoCC (to appear) 2021 (short paper).
Djob Mvondo, Antonio Barbalace, Alain Tchana, and Gilles Muller.
Data center disaggregation - when and how much? MASCOTS (to appear) 2021 (short paper).
Thomas Begin, Alexandre Brandwajn, and Alain Tchana.
SIMBox bypass frauds in cellular networks: Strategies, evolution, detection, and future directions. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (to appear) 2021.
Josiane Kouam, Aline Carneiro, and Alain Tchana
Mitigating vulnerability windows with hypervisor transplant. EuroSys 2021.
Dinh Ngoc Tu, Boris Teabe, Alain Tchana, Gilles Muller, and Daniel Hagimont
FaaSCache: an opportunistic free caching system for FaaS platforms. EuroSys 2021.
Djob Mvondo, Mathieu Bacou, Kevin Nguetchouang, Lucien Ngale, Stephane Pouget, Josiane Kouam, Renaud Lachaize, Jinho Hwang,
Tim Wood, Daniel Hagimont, Noël De Palma, Batchakui bernabé and Alain Tchana
Extending Intel PML for Hardware-Assisted Working Set Size Estimation of VMs. VEE 2021.
Stella Bitchebe, Djob Mvondo, Alain Tchana, Laurent Réveillère, and Noel De Palma
(No)Compromis: Paging virtualization is not a fatality. VEE 2021.
Boris Teabe, Peterson Yuhala, Alain Tchana, Fabien Hermenier, Daniel Hagimont, and Gilles Muller
Plinius: Secure and Persistent Machine Learning Model Training. DSN 2021.
Peterson Yuhala, Pascal Felber, Valerio Schiavoni, and Alain Tchana
Find out the complete publications list on dblp
Direction of Theophile Dubuc's thesis
Subject: Efficient storage virtualization.
Period: Nov. 2021 - Nov. 2024
Funding: CIFRE (with Outscale)
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Pierre Olivier 50% (co-director)
Direction of Kevin Nguetchouang's thesis
Subject: Efficient storage virtualization.
Period: Dec. 2020 - Dec. 2023
Funding: Labex MiLyon
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Pierre Olivier 50% (co-director)
Direction of Josiane Kouam's thesis
Subject: Simbox fraud mitigation.
Period: Nov. 2019 - Nov. 2022
Funding: INRIA CORDI-S
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Aline Carneiro 50% (co-director)
Direction of Stella Bitchebe's thesis
Subject: Hardware features for virtualization.
Period: Mar. 2019 - Mar. 2022
Funding: ANR Scalevisor
Supervision: Alain Tchana 100% (director)
Former Ph.D. Students
Direction of Lavoisier Wapet's thesis
Subject: Performance and resource management in nested virtualization systems.
Period: Fev. 2017 - Mai 2020
Funding: MESR
Currently: Post-Doc LIRIS (Lyon)
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
Direction of Djob Mvondo's thesis
Subject: Privileged VM management in virtualized systems.
Period: Feb. 2018 - Dec. 2020
Funding: FEDER
Distinction: Younger african Ph.D. Doctor (22 years old), and GDR RSD and ASF best thesis award
Currently: Associate Professor University of Rennes (France)
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Noel De Palma 50% (co-director)
Direction of Bao Bui's thesis
Subject: NUMA management in virtualized systems.
Period: Oct. 2017 - Oct. 2020
Funding: Scholarship 911 Vietnam
Currently: Lecturer at Can Tho University
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
Direction of Mathieu Bacou's thesis
Subject: Performance and resource management in nested virtualization systems.
Period: Feb. 2017 - May 2020
Funding: CIFRE Atos
Currently: Maître de Conférences
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
Direction of Grégoire Todeschi's thesis
Subject: Memory overcommitment in virtualized systems.
Period: Oct. 2016 - June 2020
Funding: MESR
Currently: Industry
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
Direction of Vlad Nitu's thesis
Subject: Memory management in virtualized systems.
Period: Oct. 2015 - Oct. 2018
Funding: MESR
Distinction: GDR RSD and ASF best thesis award (2nd place)
Currently: CR CNRS
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
Direction of Boris Teabe's thesis
Subject: Performance optimization in virtualized systems.
Period: Oct. 2014 - Oct. 2017
Funding: INRIA CORDI-S
Distinction: GDR RSD and ASF best thesis award (1rst place) et Leopold Escande award
Currently: Maître de Conférences
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
This teaching focuses on the internal architecture of operating systems: how the process, memory, file system, networks, etc. are virtualised. I also present hardware solutions that facilitate virtualisation.
This teaching focuses on the internal architecture of operating systems (process, memory, file system, IPC, Syscalls, etc.). I describe how its basic services are implemented (concepts, abstractions, mechanisms and policies), how they interact with each other, with hardware and applications.
I introduce the basic concepts of the network (IP address, OSI layers, protocol, services, etc.). This course has been introduced temporarily (as part of the Architecture course) in L3 which does not yet have a Network course. A whole course unit will be dedicated to the latter in L3 from September 2021 as part of the computing training reform that I am currently leading at ENS Lyon.
This course deals with the basic notions of computing: the hardware part of a computer (processor, memory, disk, network card), the software part of a computer (operating system, server application), networks, the Internet, installation of an operating system, etc.
This course deals with IT tools for collaborative work. I introduced the platforms: Slack, Trello, AppearIn, Zed (secure communication).
This subject deals with computer technologies useful for decision support, for an audience of non-computer specialists. I have taught the use of the Microsoft Office suite (Access database, creation of forms, reports, graphs, VBA programming, and SQL).
This course deals with the following concepts: processing XML documents by programming, implementation of compilers (notion of grammar, lexical analysis, syntactic analysis and semantic analysis), UML modeling, some design patterns (MVC, visitor and decorator), unit tests and introspection.
This course focuses on the infrastructure aspect of big data. To this end, the following notions are addressed: motivation of the bigdata, positioning with traditional data processing (limits of old technologies), the definition of the bigdata, presentation of its disciplines (visualization, analysis, platform, systems, hardware), focus on infrastructure-related disciplines (platform, systems, and hardware), presentation of the two main modes of processing of data (batch processing and streaming processing), presentation of approaches to solving these problems, presentation of the corresponding bigdata platforms.
This course covers all the basics related to Cloud Computing: principles of the cloud, benefits of the cloud for users and providers, models of the cloud, challenges of the cloud, the most famous public clouds, management systems of a private cloud, virtualisation and its role in the cloud, consolidation of virtual machines, containers, and legal aspects of the cloud.
This course introduces technologies that ease the programming of web applications, namely: the MVC (Model View Controler) design pattern, ORM (Object Relational Mapping), AngularJS, Bootstrap, JQuery, JEE, Django, and relational databases. This teaching is accompanied by a project consisting in developing a realistic web application.
This course covers the following concepts: distributed programming using sockets, RMI or JMS, and programming the integration of legacy applications using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology. This teaching is generally completed with a project carried out in groups of 4.
The concepts addressed in this course are of two types: internal constitution of an operating system (scheduler, memory manager, etc.), and use of an operating system (shell, system programming, etc.). The Linux operating system is used as a basis for work. This teaching is supplemented by a fil rouge project carried out by each student.
Data transfering among datacenters.
Distributed virtual machines.
Fault tolerance in disaggregated environments.
Distributed hypervisors.
Malicious mobile App detection.
Memory distribution within a rack.
How to choose your cloud.
Memory disaggregation.
November 2020, Lyon
October 2019, Nice
July 2018, Toulouse
2015, 2016 & 2017, Cameroon
December 2015, Vancouver, Canada
Responsabilities
46 Allée d'Italie
ENS Site Monod
69007 Lyon
alain.tchana@ens-lyon.fr