As tragically demonstrated by the 2011 Tohoku Japan earthquake, one of the most challenging issues in improving seismic hazard assessment consists in better forecasting the size/magnitude of future great (M>8) earthquakes. This requires exploring many fundamental but unresolved questions in earth sciences: What controls the lateral variation of large earthquakes occurrence along major seismic faults? What governs the transition from stick-slip behaviour to steady sliding? How do earthquake rupture zones recover and reload? How do large and small earthquakes fundamentally differ, if they do? To answer these questions active oceanic subduction zones are obvious targets because most of the great earthquakes occur there. However the presence of water prevents from measuring surface deformation within the frontal most ~100 km of major seismic structures. Much effort has been done to deploy ocean bottom instrumentation (including seismic or geodetic measurements), but the sparse coverage of these datasets still prevents detailed studies of seismic zones and of their state of stress. Here, we will rather favour the study of an emerged area: the Himalayan belt, which – as a former oceanic subduction zone – exhibits a first-order along-strike continuity of major faults and tectono-stratigraphic units that can be mapped over an E-W distance of ~2500 km. Some recent major historical earthquakes have been documented. However both the maximum earthquake size that struck the Himalayan front in the past and the probability of occurrence of a magnitude 9 megaquake in the next decades are still debated. Over the last decades most studies along the Himalayas have focused only on Central Nepal. Therefore lateral variations of the state of stress on frontal faults and the size of great Himalayan earthquakes are still poorly constrained. Based on previous studies and our own work in Nepal and Bhutan we have decided to address the question of lateral variations in seismic coupling along the Himalayan arc by extensive and detailed description of local loading (present-day convergence and seismicity rate, late Quaternary shortening rate, past seismic events), and crustal structural geometry (major faults, Moho depth, Indian plate flexure) from western Nepal to Bhutan. The proposed approach is clearly multi-disciplinary and aims at integrating deformation of the Himalayan arc over various spatial and temporal scales. Our methodology encompasses a large panel of up-to-date and innovative complementary techniques in gravity, seismology, geodesy, morpho-tectonics, paleo-seismology and thermo-mechanical numerical modelling. Gathering a high level of expertise from national (Montpellier, Paris, Nancy, Chambéry-Grenoble) and international (Switzerland, USA, India, Nepal and Bhutan) co-operation, this project will also contribute to the development of innovative methods in the InSAR processing chain, analysis of GOCE gravity data, determining accurate hypocentral location and numerical modelling. Ultimately, this project will contribute to provide the first real 3D image of the state of stress along a continental thrust-fault system, which is a crucial step in improving seismic hazard assessment in the areas producing most of the largest earthquakes.

Cure of diabetes mellitus is a hope for millions suffering from type 1 diabetes and a major challenge for health care. Current insulin treatment is insufficient to provide optimal glycaemic control; as a consequence diabetic complications remain a reality for patients. Transplantation of islets from human donors offers the perspective of stable normoglycemia with a reduction in diabetes complications, but requires immunosuppression to prevent or treat rejection: the use of immunosuppressives is associated with complications. (Micro)encapsulation of islets offers the perspective of minimizing or elimination of immunosuppressive treatment . Microencapsulation of cells in alginate-based microcapsules is well established and has already been tested in clinical explorations. Normally microcapsules prepared using conventional encapsulation equipment are in the diameter size of 400-1000 µm (compared to 50 to 400 µm size islets). A new development is to use a microfluidic platform which has the ability to easily decrease the size of the microcapsule (even for highly viscous fluids in order to keep a “constant” cell size/ capsule size ratio). This could have benefits such as a higher loading of microcapsules and a better exchange of nutrients, oxygen and the products from encapsulated cells leading to long term encapsulated cell survival. The FUTURCAPS project aims the comparison of islets encapsulated in small microcapsules (microfluidic platform) and large microcapsules (conventional encapsulators). This will be done using innovative biopolymers for encapsulation that combine ionotropic binding of alginate molecules with covalent binding using poly(ethylene glycol) molecules grafted on the alginate: covalent binding increases mechanical stability and durability of microcapsules. We will test two types of islets which are in clinics or have the perspective of clinical application: human islets and porcine neonatal islet cell clusters. These two types differ in maturation stage of insulin-producing ß cells, sensitivity to hypoxia and synthesis of insulin upon glucose stimulation, which enables to compare microcapsule size and other characteristic with these physiologic parameters. At first, we will test microcapsules of different sizes produced by the two different procedures for physico-chemical characteristics like mechanical resistance, permeability, durability, and surface morphology. This will be expanded by in vivo experiments addressing the biocompatibility of empty microcapsules upon intraperitoneal administration in naïve mice. Then, islets of different origin will be microencapsulated and tested before and after subsequent culture for composition, viability, and functional aspects such as insulin synthesis upon glucose stimulation. The quality of islets will also be assessed for expression of markers for immunogenicity, inflammation and stress responses, markers which can highly influence the in vitro and in vivo functionality. The in vivo functionality combined with adverse effects will be tested in a model that is widely used in islet testing, including release for clinical application, namely mouse with streptozotocin-induced diabetes. Upon intraperitoneal administration, reversal of hyperglycemia will be monitored, and also adverse effects like host immune and inflammatory responses resulting in granuloma and connective tissue formation, inflammatory reactions and fibrosis. The primary outcome of the FUTURCAPS project is the establishment of the best microcapsule regarding size and biomaterials used in their preparation, for use as ß-cell replacement with insulin-producing islets. This outcome will form the basis for subsequent phase transition into clinical trials in patients with type 1 diabetes, with the perspective to provide a cell therapy product for this crippling disease.

During the last five years, the interest of the scientific computing community towards accelerating devices has been rapidly growing. The reason for this interest lies in the massive computational power delivered by these devices. Several software libraries for dense linear algebra have been produced; the related algorithms are extremely rich in computation and exhibit a very regular pattern of access to data which makes them extremely good candidates for GPU execution. On the contrary, methods for the direct solution of sparse linear systems have irregular, indirect memory access patterns that adversely interact with typical GPU throughput optimizations. This project aims at studying and designing algorithms and parallel programming models for implementing direct methods for the solution of sparse linear systems on emerging computer equipped with accelerators. The ultimate aim of this project is to achieve the implementation of a software package providing a solver based on direct methods for sparse linear systems of equations. To date, the approaches proposed to achieve this objective are mostly based on a simple offloading of some computational tasks to the accelerators and rely on fine hand-tuning of the code and accurate performance modeling to achieve efficiency. This project proposes an innovative approach which relies on the efficiency and portability of runtime systems. The development of a production-quality, sparse direct solver requires a considerable research effort along three distinct axis: - linear algebra: algorithms have to be adapted or redesigned in order to exhibit properties that make their implementation and execution on heterogeneous computing platforms efficient and reliable. This may require the development of novel methods for defining data access patterns that are more suitable for the dynamic scheduling of computational tasks on processing units with considerably different capabilities as well as techniques for guaranteeing a reliable and robust behavior and accurate solutions. In addition, it will be necessary to develop novel and efficient accelerator implementations of the specific dense linear algebra kernels that are used within sparse, direct solvers; - runtime systems: tools such as the StarPU runtime system proved to be extremely efficient and robust for the implementation of dense linear algebra algorithms. Sparse linear algebra algorithms, however, are commonly characterized by complicated data access patterns, computational tasks with extremely variable granularity and complex dependencies. Therefore, a substantial research effort is necessary to design and implement features as well as interfaces to comply with the needs formalized by the research activity on direct methods; - scheduling: executing a heterogeneous workload with complex dependencies on a heterogeneous architecture is a very challenging problem that demands the development of effective scheduling algorithms. These will be confronted with possibly limited views of dependencies among tasks and multiple, and potentially conflicting objectives, such as minimizing the makespan, maximizing the locality of data or, where it applies, minimizing the memory consumption. Given the wide availability of computing platforms equipped with accelerators and the numerical robustness of direct solution methods for sparse linear systems, it is reasonable to expect that the outcome of this project will have a considerable impact on both academic and industrial scientific computing. This project will moreover provide a substantial contribution to the computational science and high-performance computing communities, as it will deliver an unprecedented example of a complex numerical code whose parallelization completely relies on runtime scheduling systems and which is, therefore, extremely portable, maintainable and evolvable towards future computing architectures.

In May 2011, IRAM (Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique) issued a call for tender for the next generation continuum instrumentation of the 30-m telescope at Pico Veleta (Spain). The NIKA (New IRAM KIDs Arrays) consortium answered with a detailed proposal to build a large-format, dual-color (150GHz = 2mm and 240GHz = 1.25mm) camera. This proposal was examined by the IRAM Scientific Advisory Committee who has recently issued a positive recommendation for the NIKA camera. The instrument will be based on the new and extremely promising KIDs (Kinetic Inductance Detectors) technology. The technological program is led by French researchers at the Institut Néel and LPSC (Grenoble). The French part of the collaboration is completed by IPAG (Grenoble), IAS (Orsay), CEA-IRFU (Saclay) and IRAP (Toulouse). IRAM-Grenoble is actively participating to the project, contributing with 50% co-financing and their expertise in the field of detectors design/fabrication, electronics and data analysis. At the international level, this French consortium will collaborate with the University of Cardiff (UK), the Netherlands Institute for Space Research – SRON and The University of Roma La Sapienza (Italy). The international collaborators will provide in particular, on independent funding, the optical filters and the beam splitter. The NIKA camera will be based on a prototype instrument already tested at the IRAM 30-m telescope in 2009, 2010 and 2011. These successful technical/scientific runs allowed for the first time to assess the viability of the KIDs technology for ground-based mm-wave observations. In particular, the 2011 dual-band prototype exhibited a state-of-the-art performance at 150 GHz. The instrument will incorporate a continuous close-cycled dilution refrigerator with a base temperature of 100 mK, cold reimaging optics and filters designed to sample a 6 arc minute field of view simultaneously in at least 2 channels centered at wavelengths of 1.25 and 2 mm. The baseline detector focal plane units will consist of arrays of KIDs with a pixel spacing of 0.75 f*lambda giving approximately 1000 detectors at 2 mm and 3000 detectors at 1.25 mm. These detectors will be read out with a maximum of 16 cold amplifiers, and the same number of coaxial cables pairs. On top of that, the implementation of a “Polarization Channel” allowing linearly polarized continuum emission to be measured in at least the 1.2 mm band is being planned as a future upgrade. The implementation of a third imaging band in the sub-mm range (850 micron) is also envisaged as a second-priority upgrade. In the present proposal, we request ANR support for the construction of the baseline instrument (dual-band, pure imaging, as stated by IRAM in their call). Funding for the “Polarization Channel” upgrade has already been obtained by CEA-IRFU (Saclay) as part of an ERC European contract. The baseline instrument will be designed to be fully compatible with both upgrades. The duration of this ANR program is three years, mainly dedicated to an intense instrumental development: cryostat fabrication, detectors and electronics design, fabrication and testing. The last semester is mainly characterized by the instrument commissioning at the Pico Veleta telescope. At the end of the ANR project, the NIKA camera will become a powerful facility instrument (e.g. the gain in mapping speed compared to the previous generation continuum instrument is 40-100) which will benefit the entire community of astronomers using IRAM.

Superconducting magnets are nowadays widely used and the very high magnetic fields they can generate have revolutionized a large range of applications. Superconducting devices are still very expensive, not only because of the cost of the superconducting materials and their fabrication, but because most of them can only be operated at 4 K (liquid helium temperature). The forecasted electricity prices in western countries and the future availability and cost of helium, ask for urgent studies and innovative pilot projects in the field of the “energy efficient” design of superconducting magnets, using high temperature superconductors (HTS). CEA led the submission to a FET-OPEN call organized in September 2015 of the proposal NEEDS. This proposal was aiming to develop a Novel Energy Efficient Design of Superconducting magnets. The first goal was the development and the fabrication of innovative HTS tapes and cables with very low losses. The second priority was the innovative and fully-original integration directly inside a magnet coil assembly of a Cryogenic Pulsating Heat Pipes (CPHP) cooling system working at 77 K (liquid nitrogen temperature), which would lead to a compact and much cheaper cryogenic system. Third and fourth final targets were the realization and tests of two demonstrator magnets to validate the successful implementation of the developments. The NEEDS program was based on the collaboration of world-wide recognized physics research organizations, one university and high-tech EU Industries. The NEEDS program provides a significant breakthrough in fundamentals fields. Main advancements covers material science and its technology challenges (with the manufacturing of high-tech HTS compounds) and also fluid-dynamic and heat transfer processes (with the comprehension and mastering of the key parameters governing the CPHP, field that is still in a pioneering phase). Short-term applications are evident and immediate in the particle accelerators domain where several projects now in R&D phase are deeply looking to maximization of energy saving. Practically any domains based on superconducting magnets can benefit of the NEEDS project with the development of such energy-efficient magnet design, especially medical and power applications, which could have a strong and durable impact on the society. Despite a very good evaluation (overall score of 4.2/5), the project was unfortunately not funded due to the very strong selection (only 11 funded projects over 800 submitted). The novelty of the NEEDS program was clearly stated by the four reviewers. But the main weakness is that NEEDS was too much focusing on particle accelerators magnets, when many other fields could benefit of the technological outcome. Considering the very high potential of the technical novelties covered of NEEDS and their own strategic interests, several partners agreed to prepare a new proposal, taking into account comments of the first evaluation. The NISMAT program aims at developing a Network on Innovative Superconducting MAgnet Technologies that will include new partners to extend the possible applications of NEEDS to other sectors of activities. The goal of NISMAT will be to present the expected developments accomplished in the frame of the NEEDS project to industries and labs in order to associate at least one of the few European companies expert in superconducting magnet fabrication and to identify possible new applications and future research activities. Besides, the presentation and the wording of the first proposal have to be improved in order to highlight the overall quality of the project and to show how NEEDS will have a strong impact on other applied superconducting technologies. Therefore, NISMAT will also fund a professional expert in elaborating scientific proposals for European calls to support the new NEEDS proposal preparation.