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PR Alain TCHANA

ENS de Lyon LIP Laboratory Avalon Team

alain.tchana@ens-lyon.fr
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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!

Systems Domain

Publications (in 2021)

  • 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

Current Ph.D. students

  • 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)

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News

2022-2027, I will lead of a CNRS IRP (International Research Projet) with with Polytechnique Yaoundé, for 5 years.

December 2nd 2021, I will give a talk at Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in the context of the Doctoral Program in Computer Science of the Universities of Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Bern.

September 14th and 15th 2021. I co-organize the Security days in France, which is a virtual event..

September, 2021. I went to Bucarest (Romania) for the Semaine Scientifique de l'AUF..

Since September 2021. I am the head of Computer Science Department of ENS Lyon..

September, 2021. I was appointed to Comité national de la recherche scientifique..

July, 2021. I have been awarded by CNRS GDR RSD as the best 2021 researcher in France for the Network and Distributed Systems research field. Se the announcement here.

May, 2021. The PhD thesis of my former PhD student, Djob Mvondo, that I co-supervised with Noel De Palma received the best PhD thesis award from CNRS GDR RSD . You can find his thesis here.

June 1rst, 2021. I am invited by Outscale 3DS (a cloud provider) to give a talk during their cloud days.

June 22th, 2021. I am invited by Telecom SudParis to give review their computer science department training program.

June 8th, 2021, at 3pm (Paris time). I have the pleasure to invite David A. Patterson for a talk to the french research community.

May 29th, 2021. I will present our associated Inria research team MLNS2 during the scientific days of Inria.

May 25th, 2021. I will present our associated Inria research team MLNS2 during the scientific days of LIRIMA.

May 10th, 2021. I am invited by ENS-IISER workshop organizers to present my feedback about the e-learning platforms that I setup for african schools during the covid-19 pandemic.

My student Stella Bitchebe and I are the winners of the "Concours Inria d'Idées innovantes 2021".

Our two papers get accepted at EuroSys 2021.

  • OFC: an opportunistic free caching system for FaaS platforms.
  • Mitigating vulnerability windows with hypervisor transplant.

My student Stella Bitchebe obtained the NEC Ph.D. fellowship grants 2021 (49k €).

Since 2021, Head of the Inria associated team Machine Learning, Network, System and Security (MLNS2) with Polytechnique Yaoundé (Cameroon).

MOOC on Operating Systems for the CAPES.

Deputy of the Computer Science Department of ENS de Lyon. (I will be the director of this department from the next academic year 2021/2022)

Reviewer of Pierre-Evariste Dagand's HDR.

Examiner Quentin Dufour's Ph.D. (Université de Rennes I).

On April 5, my student Lavoisier Wapet will defend his Ph.D.

Teaching

Since 2019

Virtualisation avancée

ENS de Lyon, M1

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.

Since 2019

Evaluation de performance et réseaux

ENS de Lyon, L3

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.

2020

Réseaux

ENS de Lyon, L3

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.

2018 - 2019

Bases de l'informatique

IUT de Nice, L3

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.

2018 - 2019

Outils collaboratifs

IUT de Nice, L2

This course deals with IT tools for collaborative work. I introduced the platforms: Slack, Trello, AppearIn, Zed (secure communication).

2018 - 2019

Informatique Décisionnelle

IUT de Nice, L2

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).

2018 - 2019

Programmation avancée

N7 (ENSEEIHT), M1

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.

Since 2013

Big Data

Université de Nice M1 & Polytechnique Yaoundé M2

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.

Since 2013

Cloud Computing

Université de Nice M1 & Polytechnique Yaoundé M2

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.

2013 - 2018

Programmation Web

N7 M1 & Formation Fullstack L2

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.

2013 - 2018

Programmation distribuée et intergiciels

N7 M1

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.

2013 - 2018

Systèmes d’exploitation

N7 M1 & Formation Fullstack L2

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.

Projects

2020 - 2024

PicNic (ANR)

Data transfering among datacenters.

2019 - 2020

SprinkledOS (Attractivity ENS Lyon)

Distributed virtual machines.

2019 - 2020

ScalevisorFT (Impulsion labex MiLyon)

Fault tolerance in disaggregated environments.

2019 - 2022

Scalevisor (ANR)

Distributed hypervisors.

2019 - 2021

IMAD (Toulouse Tech Transfer)

Malicious mobile App detection.

2017 - 2019

BlablaMem (Région Occitanie)

Memory distribution within a rack.

2016 - 2017

KelCloud (Toulouse Tech Transfer)

How to choose your cloud.

2015 - 2017

Zombie (Toulouse Tech Transfer)

Memory disaggregation.

Conferences Organization

Responsabilities

  • Since 2021, Head of the associated team Inria Machine Learning, Network, System and Security (MLNS2) with Polytechnique Yaoundé (Cameroon).

  • Since 2020, Elected member of the ASF's Bureau (chapter FRANCE of the ACM Sigops).

  • Since 2020, Co-leader of the Systems, Networks and Telecommunications theme of the FIL (Fédération Informatique Lyonnaise).

  • Since 2020, Co-founder and moderator of the French Computer Science Research forum (+150 researchers).

  • Since 2020, Member of the ASDS (African Society in Digital Sciences) Bureau.

  • Since 2020, Member of the United Nation Roundtable 3C on AI.

  • Since 2019, Member of the GDR RSD steering committee: I'm co-leading the Cloud and Virtualization theme.

  • Since 2019, Co-responsible of the LIP's Gender Equality Committee.

  • Since 2019, Member of the ComPas steering committee.

  • Since 2018, Member appointed to the IRIT Laboratory Council.

Medias and Others

  • September 23, 2021, I was interviewed by RFI during the Semaine Scientifique de l'AUF in Bucarest (Romania): interview, Facebook live, and Instagram.

  • Listen my interview made by Thierno Barry for African of Interest.

  • My Ph.D. student Stella Bitchebe, who obtained the NEC Student fellowship grants 2021 was interviewed by Cameroon National Television on the occasion of the celebration of the International Women's Rights Day (8 March 2021). Listen to her interview here.

  • My former Ph.D. student Djob Mvondo, who defended at the age of 22 in December 2020, was cited as an example for the youth by the president of the republic of Cameroon. Read more about in cameroon-info.

  • Private deployment of a distance learning platform during covid for African institutions and universities. Find out more here (click on Cameroon): used by +100 institutions.

  • Development of a website and mobile application to track the progress of covid in Cameroon. Find out more on youtube and linkedin.

  • In 2008, when I was a master's student, a friend and I pulled off a technological feat to solve the problem of changing the telephone numbering system in Cameroon. Find out more explanation on it here.

2021 Rejected papers

  • CCGRID, ApSys

Where to find me

46 Allée d'Italie
ENS Site Monod
69007 Lyon

Email Me At

alain.tchana@ens-lyon.fr