The domain of research of the CDA team concerns the different aspects related to challenges in distributed computing. We consider both traditional themes of research of the distributed algorithm domain such as determining the global state of a distributed system for distributed determination detection and new challenges related to the solution of complex or large scale problems in combinatorial optimization or numerical simulation using techniques such as peer to peer distributed computing in massive parallelism context. As a consequence the research works of the team concern the design and analysis of distributed algorithms and distributed computing environments.

The DCA team aims particularly at developing two concepts: asynchronism and auto organisation which constitute major challenges for the advancement of distributed computing at a very large scale. These concepts are gaining considerable attention today because very large distributed systems must cope with the very asynchronous nature of communication networks, dynamicity and the presence of faults in the system on the one side and can no longer be controlled from outside on the other side.

In particular, researchs are made on asynchronous iterative algorithms which are particularly well suited to the massive distributed computing context in the presence of faults. Studies are developed for high performance distributed processing on dedicated architectures as in the ANR project Smart Suface and on general architectures.