Martin Quinson

I'm a professor at ENS Rennes since 2015, member of the Magellan project-team in the Irisa laboratory (this is in Rennes, France). My main research topic is about the evaluation of distributed systems, through numerical simulation and formal methods for the joint study of their performance and correction.

French Curriculum Vitæ (Feb'25); English Curriculum Vitæ (Jan'24).

On the personal side, I'm 31 (in hexadecimal, of course), married and with three great sons. My nickname is emptty, and I'm a convinced kopimist (but also pastafarist).

Distributed Systems (details)

My main research is about experimentation methodologies for large-scale distributed systems. Ongoing projects:

  • SimGrid is a framework to build simulators of large scale distributed applications. It is widely used as a scientific instrument to evaluate the performance of Clouds, Fogs and HPC systems [CGL+25, COQ24].

  • McSimGrid is a software model checker. It explores exhaustively the tree of possibilities for programs launched in SimGrid. It leverages formal techniques to detect symmetries in execution histories, to reduce the state space while exploring all possible behaviors [PJQ19].

  • sthread is a lightweight virtualization framework enabling any pthread application to run on top of SimGrid [CQ20]. Along with McSimGrid, it enable the formal verification of arbitrary threaded applications.

  • TANSIV interconnects KVM and Xen virtual machines with a network simulator to study malware evading the analysis when they detect network inconsistencies [CRSQ24].

Low-tech computing (details)

I'm working on low-tech computing, that is, computing solutions that are (1) sustainable and low-resources (2) empowering to the users (3) fostering social interactions.

  • The SmolPhone will be a device offering some services of a smartphone, but with one week of battery life. It is not an optimized smartphone but a small device built around a microcontroler [PQQR23, RPQR24].

Teaching

  • Programming: Introduction to programming, Object programming with Java, C programming and introduction to UNIX.
  • Systems: System Programming, Operating System Design.
  • Distribution: Distributed Algorithms, Grid Computing.

Hacking and Mediation

Debian developer and author of outreach activities.

Administrativae

I act as a chair for the Département d'informatique de l'ENS Rennes. We do have an open position for 2025.

I'm also in charge of the first year of this curriculum.

Current Students and Engineers

  • Victorien Elvinger (Dec. 2024-Nov 2026): Engineer on the SmolPhone project
  • Aurel Hamon (Sept 2024-April 2025): M1 year-long project on embedded HTML rendering
  • Mathieu Laurent (since 2023): PhD on Mc SimGrid
  • Léo Cosseron (since 2022): PhD on the TANSIV project.

Open positions