WIDE : The World Is DistributEd, Exploring the tension between scale and coordination

WIDE is a joint research team of Inria and IRISA (CNRS UMR 6074), hosted at University of Rennes 1, in Rennes, France.

We are a 15+ strong group of researchers, academics, and PhD students focusing on the design, evaluation and implementation of large-scale distributed computer systems (from geodistributed applications to IoT ecosystems).
As distributed computing systems are being deployed within a growing number of everyday applications, they are reaching unheard-of levels of scale, dynamicity, and complexity. The construction of such systems requires novel fundamental approaches that stand in stark contrast to existing strategies in many areas of distributed computing research. The objective of the WIDE team is to provide such a foundation, by exploring the inherent tension between scalability and coordination guarantees. We are developing novel techniques and paradigms that are adapted to the rapid and profound changes impacting today’s distributed systems, both in terms of the application domains they support and the operational constraints they must meet.