My research is mostly on the evaluation of performance and correction of distributed systems in the contexts of High Performance Computing, Grid Computing, Clouds and Fogs. I use numerical simulation and formal methods for the joint study of the performance and correction of these systems.

I recently got interested in low-tech computing. The SmolPhone project is a research-action on the design of device that offers some of the services of a conventional smartphone but with a battery life of one week and a lifespan of a decade.

Back in 2015, I was also involved in Computer Science Education, but I did not do anything useful since then.

You may want to consult my list of publications, my page about and for Students or a list of my recent talks.

Five representative publications

Here are five publications that are representative of my recent work.

[CGL+25]

Henri Casanova, Arnaud Giersch, Arnaud Legrand, Martin Quinson, Frédéric Suter.
Lowering entry barriers to developing custom simulators of distributed applications and platforms with SimGrid.
Parallel Computing, 2025, 123, pp.103125 (Article, HAL).

This is the new reference publication on the SimGrid scientific instrument. It provides an experience report on modeling distributed infrastructures within the SimGrid project. The article describes the modeling mechanisms implemented since [CGL+14] to improve the extensibility and usability of the tool, without sacrificing the precision and versatility at high performance that have been its strengths for over 20 years. The article also briefly presents how a performance simulator and a model checker can coexist and mutually reinforce each other in SimGrid.

[COQ24]

Clément Courageux-Sudan, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Martin Quinson.
Studying the end-to-end performance, energy consumption and carbon footprint of fog applications.
ISCC'24 -- 29th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (HAL).

This publication is the latest outcome of the thesis by C. Courageux-Sudan, which I co-supervised with A.C. Orgerie until 2023. We present an end-to-end study of a modern digital infrastructure based on microservices, taking into account both user devices, the Cloud and Fog infrastructure, and the wired and Wi-Fi interconnection of the platform. We evaluate the platform's performance, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions, partially validating the simulation results through experiments on a real-world platform. I currently have no other ongoing work in this area.

[CRSQ24]

Léo Cosseron, Louis Rilling, Matthieu Simonin, Martin Quinson.
Simulating the Network Environment of Sandboxes to Hide Virtual Machine Introspection Pauses.
EuroSec'24 -- 17th European Workshop on Systems Security (HAL).

This publication is the first outcome of the thesis by L. Cosseron, who I am co-supervising with L. Rilling since 2022. We present our work on interconnecting KVM or Xen virtual machines through the SimGrid simulator to enable the study of malware that deactivates itself upon detecting inconsistencies in its network environment. This first publication naturally aligns with my work over the past 20 years on virtualizing distributed applications to study them effectively [Qui06, GNQ11, DLM+17, CQ20]. Other publications are currently under submission.

[PJQ19]

The Anh Pham, Thierry Jéron, Martin Quinson.
Unfolding-based Dynamic Partial Order Reduction of Asynchronous Distributed Programs.
FORTE 2019 - 39th International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems, Jun 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark ([HAL|https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02109769]]).

This publication is an outcome of the thesis by T.A. Pham, which I co-supervised with T. Jéron until 2019. We present a formal model of SimGrid's computation model, as well as an adaptation of the UDPOR algorithm for state space reduction to this computation model. This article is somewhat dated now, but unfortunately, we have not yet submitted any papers as part of the thesis of Mathieu Laurent, which I have been co-supervising with T. Jéron since 2023, as a continuation of this work. Expanding the tool's scope from distributed to concurrent systems while further enhancing its efficiency through heuristics for guiding the exploration of the reduced state space requires a relatively heavy implementation effort

[PQQR23]

Joseph Paturel, Clément Quinson, Martin Quinson, Simon Rokicki.
SmolPhone: a smartphone with energy limits.
IGSC 2023 -- 14th International conference on Green and Sustainable Computing, Oct (HAL, slides).

This is a position paper presenting our vision for the SmolPhone project. Although it is a very short article, it has been highly significant for me, as I was not initially certain that our vision could form the basis of a viable research program. Its publication convinced us of the value of the approach, which we are currently pursuing as part of an Inria exploratory action.