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 Université Côte d'Azur at the rank of Full Professor. Then in 2019, Alain Tchana was recruited at Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Lyon in the Laboratoire de l'Informatique pour le Parallélisme (LIP). At ENS de Lyon, Alain Tchana was in charge of a Systems research group composed of about five PhD students. He was also the head of the computer science department, co-chair of the LIP's parity committee, and member of the CNRS national committee. In September 2022, Alain Tchana was recruited at ENSIMAG - Grenoble INP in the ERODS team of the LIG laboratory, where he is co-leader of the Défi INRIA OS.
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, ATC, Infocom, DSN). Alain has served as PC member of several Systems conferences such as EuroSys, NSDI, DSN, ATC, hotOS. 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: Operating system, datacenter disaggregation, storage virtualization, virtualization of hardware features for virtualization, performance improvement, and securing applications. During his Ph.D. thesis and post-doctorate, his research was in autonomous administration, a sub-field of Middleware. He participated in developing the first orchestrators for the cloud (RoboConf, transferred to Linagora). He has several publications in Middleware, the main conference of that domain. Once permanent (in 2013), he oriented his research in Systems, particularly Virtualization and Operating Systems. He is now interested in improving application performance and saving energy. System research domain is at the junction of several research domains. He has several publications in EuroSys (System), Infocom (Networks), DSN (Security), RAID (Security), Sigmetrics (Networks, Systems, Security), ATC (System), and SuperComputing (HPC). He is currently working on several exiting projects including, xOS (end of Process and Thread reign in the OS), MiLK (micro-kernalization of Linux), rgpdOS (Law and Operating System to take into account data privacy laws at the operating system level).
Simply, Alain Tchana is a System's guy!
Contact alain.tchana@grenoble-inp.fr if you want to do System (for performance, resource saving, fault tolerance, security, etc.).
Publications
Find out my publications list on dblp
Current Ph.D. Students
Direction of Dufy Teguia's thesis
Subject: Techniques avancées pour la spécialisation de fonctions réseaux conteneurisées.
Period: Mar. 2023 - Mar. 2026
Funding: CIFRE (Orange Labs)
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Kahina Lazri 50% (co-sueprvisor)
Direction of Assane Fall's thesis
Subject: Hoisting Linux Memory manager to userspace.
Period: Oct. 2022 - Oct. 2025
Funding: Defi INRIA
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
JP Lozi 50% (co-supervisor)
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 Yves Kone's thesis
Subject: IPC improvement in bare metal and virtualized environments.
Period: Dec. 2020 - Dec. 2024
Funding: ANR PicNic
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 50% (co-director)
Direction of Peterson Yuhala's thesis
Subject: Enhancing Security and Performance in Trusted Execution Environments.
Period: Dec. 2019 - Feb. 2024
Funding: NA
Supervision: Alain Tchana 33% (co-director)
Daniel Hagimont 33% (co-director) and Valerio Schiavoni 33% (co-director)
Former Ph.D. Students
Direction of Josiane Kouam's thesis
Subject: Simbox fraud mitigation.
Period: Nov. 2019 - May 2023
Funding: INRIA CORDI-S
Currently: Post-Doc Inria (Paris)
Supervision: Alain Tchana 50% (co-director)
Aline Carneiro 50% (co-director)
Direction of Stella Bitchebe's thesis
Subject: Out-of-Hypervisor (OoH): When Nested Virtualization Becomes Practical.
Period: Mar. 2019 - Feb. 2023
Funding: ANR Scalevisor
Currently: Post-Doc at McGuill (Canada)
Supervision: Alain Tchana 100%
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)
The last decade has seen the rapid digitalization of our societies (health, politics, transport, and so on), resulting in the appearance of a large diversity of applications and hardware that the operating system (OS) must consider. In addition, new critical concerns have emerged such as data privacy and carbon emission. Consequently, the OS (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows), which is at the heart of the machine, includes general-purpose sub-optimal policies (memory management, process scheduling). Their customization is arduous, not within reach of system integrators, and requires machine reboot (thus causing unavailability). The fundamental problem of popular OSes is their monolithic nature, which enforces packaging all OS services in a single binary that runs in the privileged mode of the CPU (kernel space), where customization is intricate.
MiLK resurrects microkernels, which advocates uncoupling OS services and running all of them in the unprivileged mode of the CPU (userspace), where quick customization is conceivable. Given an existing monolithic OS, MiLK mutates it into another one (called fluid OS) whose services can be specialized by integrators to meet a specific setup for achieving optimal performance, energy consumption, and privacy.
MiLK should answer four questions:
Q1: Designing. How to redesign a monolithic OS without sacrificing maintainability? Based on Linux and instrumentation, we will identify and instrument all OS functions that will allow service explode and outsourcing into userspace.
Q2: Abstracting. Which abstraction suits userspace OS services as Process and Thread are respectively strongly and weakly isolated. We will invent the appropriate first-class concepts using hardware and software co-design.
Q3: Characterizing. What should be the language support provided to integrators? We will characterize existing high-level languages and we will create Domain Specific Languages.
Q4: Verifying. How to keep the resulting OS as safe as the original one? We will verify all our OS extensions, userspace libraries, and communication protocols using verification tools and techniques.
To show the effectiveness of MiLK, I will study several use cases, targeting energy consumption, performance, and privacy goals. Concerning the latter for instance, I will design a GDPR compliant file system services so that all applications could take benefit from it. By considering GDPR at the OS-level, my approach prevents application developpers and companies to deal with the law. I will conduct this pluridisciplinary work in collaboration with law researchers. We have published on arXiv a vision paper.
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.
May 2022, Lyon
April 2021, Rennes
November 2020, Lyon
October 2019, Nice
July 2018, Toulouse
2015, 2016 & 2017, Cameroon
December 2015, Vancouver, Canada
Responsibilities (to be updated)
Medias, Awards, and Distinctions
Batiment IMAG
150 Place du torrent
38401 St Martin d'Hères
alain.tchana@grenoble-inp.fr