BonFIRE is a 8,5-million-Euro EU-funded initiative (EU grant agreement 257386) funded by the 7th FWP (Seventh Framework Programme) under the Future Internet Experimental Facility and Experimentally-driven Research (ICT-2009.1.6) area, aimed at designing, building and operating a multi-site cloud facility to support applications, services and systems research targeting the Internet of Services community within the Future Internet.

BonFIRE will operate a Cloud facility based on an Infrastructure as a Service delivery model with guidelines, policies and best practices for experimentation. BonFIRE will adopt a federated multi-platform approach providing interconnection and interoperation between novel service and networking testbeds. The platform will offer advanced services and tools for services research including cloud federation, virtual machine management, service modelling, service lifecycle management, service level agreements, quality of service monitoring and analytics.

DSA-Research will join a consortium of world leading industrial and academic organisations in cloud computing to deliver a robust, reliable and sustainable facility for large scale experimentally-driven cloud research. Multinational companies (ATOS, HP, SAP), renowned universities and super computing centres (EPCC, HLRS Stuttgart, IBBT, TUB), research centres (IT Innovation, FhG Fokus, INRIA, i2CAT) and technology analysts (451 Group) provide the complimentary expertise and infrastructure resources necessary to accelerate the research and development within the Internet of Services community.

This news consolidates DSA-Research’s position at the cutting edge of cloud computing research worldwide, following two recent announcements of its participation in the EU’s StratusLab project, aimed at bringing cloud and virtualization to grid computing, and its participation in the EU’s 4CaaSt project, aimed at building the PaaS cloud of the future.

Ignacio M. Llorente

Cloud computing is transforming the way we use the web but there’s still a long way to go before we make full use of the promise it offers. Projects Magazine – the leading research and development magazine in the areas of science and technology – interviews Professor Ignacio M. Llorente, the head of the DSA-Research group.

4CaaSt is a 15-million-Euro EU-funded initiative (EU grant agreement 258862) funded by the 7th FWP (Seventh Framework Programme) under the Internet of Services, Software & virtualisation (ICT-2009.1.2) area, aimed at creating an advanced PaaS Cloud platform which supports the optimized and elastic hosting of Internet-scale multi-tier applications. 4CaaSt embeds all the necessary features, easing programming of rich applications and enabling the creation of a true business ecosystem where applications coming from different providers can be tailored to different users, mashed up and traded together.

DSA-Research will join a consortium of Europe’s leading experts in cloud computing, including UPM, 2nd Quadrant Limited, BonitaSoft, Bull SAS, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Ericsson GMBH, FlexiScale, France Telecom, Universitat St Gallen, ICCS/NTUA, Nokia Siemens Networks, SAP AG, Telecom Italia, UCM, Universitaet Stuutgart, UvT-EISS, and ZIB. OpenNebula, developed by DSA-Research, will provide the EU FP7 project with a powerful technoloy to build IaaS clouds supporting automatic scaling of resources to run the business use-case scenarios in real world conditions. This news consolidates DSA-Research’s position at the cutting edge of cloud computing research worldwide, following an announcement two months ago of its participation in the EU’s StratusLab project, aimed at bringing cloud and virtualization to grid computing.

Ignacio M. Llorente

Researchers from a collaboration of six European organisations have attracted funding worth €2.3million to develop a new Internet-based software project called StratusLab. The two year project, headed up by Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis from CNRS, was launched in Paris today (14th June 2010). It aims to enhance distributed computing infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), that allow research and higher education institutes from around the world to pool computing resources.

Funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the two year project aims to successfully integrate ‘cloud computing’ technologies into ‘grid’ infrastructures. Grids link computers and data that are scattered across the globe to work together for common goals, whilst cloud computing makes software platforms or virtual servers available as a service over the Internet, usually on a commercial basis, and provides a way for organisations to access computing capacity without investing directly in new infrastructure. Behind cloud services are data centres that typically house large numbers of processors and vast data storage systems. Linking grid and cloud technologies will result in major benefits for European academic research and is part of the European Commission strategy to develop European computing infrastructures.

StratusLab will integrate, distribute and maintain a sustainable open-source cloud distribution to bring cloud to existing and new grid sites. The StratusLab toolkit will be composed of existing cutting edge open source software, and the innovative service and cloud management technologies developed in the project. The StratusLab toolkit will integrate OpenNebula, the leading open-source toolkit for cloud computing,

Speaking about the project, Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis said: “Computer grids are used by thousands of researchers in many scientific fields. For example, the data from the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator situated at CERN in Switzerland, are distributed via an international grid infrastructure to be processed at institutes around Europe and the world. The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands. Later it will allow organisations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.”

The StratusLab project will bring several benefits to the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem including simplified management, added flexibility, increased maintainability, quality, energy efficiency and resilience of computing sites. It will benefit a wide variety of users from scientists, who can use the systems to run scientific analyses, to system administrators and hardware technicians, who are responsible for running grid services and maintaining the hardware and infrastructure at various resource centres.

The StratusLab project brings together six organisations, all key players with recognised leadership, proven expertise, experience and skills in grid and cloud computing. This collaboration presents a balanced combination of academic, research and industrial institutes with complementary capabilities. The participating organisations include the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; the DSA-Research Group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain; the Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., Greece; SixSq Sárl, Switzerland; Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo, Spain, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

About the StratusLab Project

The StratusLab project consists of numerous collaborators from six European research institutions. A website can be accessed via the following address: www.stratuslab.eu. The project is partially funded by the European Commission through the Grant Agreement RI-261552.

About OpenNebula

OpenNebula is the most advanced open-source toolkit for building private, public and hybrid clouds, offering unique features for cloud management and providing the integration capabilities that many enterprise IT shops need for internal cloud. OpenNebula is the result of many years of research and development in efficient and scalable management of virtual machines on large-scale distributed infrastructures. The technology has been designed to address the requirements of business use cases from leading companies in the context of flagship international projects in cloud computing. For more info: http://www.OpenNebula.org

About European Union Framework Programme 7

The Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) bundles all research-related EU initiatives together under a common roof playing a crucial role in reaching the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment. The framework programme runs a number of programmes under the headings Cooperation, Ideas, People and Capacities. All specific programmes work together to promote and encourage the creation of European poles of scientific excellence. More information on FP7 can be obtained from http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html.

A couple of months ago the OpenNebula open-source project established the OpenNebula Ecosystem in order to promote the different tools, extensions and plug-ins that are available to complement OpenNebula from a wide variety of projects, companies, and research centers. These ecosystem components enhance the functionality provided by the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit or enable its integration with existing products, services and management tools in the virtualization, cloud and data center ecosystems. Recently two new components have been added to the catalog:

• Deltacloud Driver: Deltacloud RedHat’s project defines a web service API for interacting with cloud service providers and resources in those clouds in a unified manner.
• Libcloud Driver: Libcloud is a pure python client library for interacting with many of the popular cloud server providers.

A team led by Sebastien Goasguen in Clemson University has also contributed a tool for transferring files to Unix machines on a cluster, this Python tool is able to transfer a 10GB file to 450 hosts in less than one hour. scp-wave tool is of great help when deploying virtualized services on very large-scale infrastructures.

In few weeks the project will announce new tools in the ecosystem, like the support for new cloud APIs (now OpenNebula already supports OCCI and EC2-Query).

Ignacio M. Llorente

As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D has decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during its research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds.  These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.

These components will continue evolving and put into a “production” status by Telefónica I+D. Each component will be released with its own Open Source License (GPL, Apache, MPL, etc.). Telefónica I+D will also provide commercial support following a dual-license schema.

The Claudia Platform is aligned with the Morfeo’s Cloud Technologies Chapter vision of integrating a complete Open Source Stack for managing a IaaS Cloud. In this way, Claudia will be fully integrated with OpenNebula through the OCCI API as both are members of the chapter.

More details: http://claudia.morfeo-project.org/

Ignacio Martin Llorente

Future enterprise data centers will look like private clouds supporting a flexible and agile execution of virtualized services, and combining local with public cloud-based infrastructure to enable highly scalable hosting environments. The key component in these cloud architectures will the cloud management system, also called cloud operating system (OS), being responsible for the secure, efficient and scalable management of the cloud resources. With high-end computing demands, cloud operating systems will continue to be a very active field of research and development; in many ways displacing “traditional” OS to be part of the application stack.

Future enterprise data centers will look like private clouds supporting a flexible and agile execution of virtualized services, and combining local with public cloud-based infrastructure to enable highly scalable hosting environments. The key component in these cloud architectures will the cloud management system, also called cloud operating system (OS), being responsible for the secure, efficient and scalable management of the cloud resources. Cloud OS are displacing “traditional” OS, which will be part of the application stack.

Flexibility in Cloud Operating Systems

A Cloud OS administers the complexity of a distributed infrastructure in the execution of virtualized service workloads. The Cloud OS manages a number of servers and hardware devices and their infrastructure services which make up a cloud system, giving the user the impression that they are interacting with a single infinite capacity and elastic cloud. In the same way that multi-threaded OS define the thread as the unit of execution and the multi-threaded application as the management entity, supporting communication and synchronization instruments; multi-tier Cloud OS define the VM as the basic execution unit and the multi-tier virtualized service (group of VMs) as the basic management entity, supporting different communication instruments and their auto-configuration at boot time. This concept helps to create scalable applications because you can add VMs as and when needed. Individual multi-tier applications are all isolated from each other, but individual VMs in the same application are not as they all may share a communication network and services as and when needed.

A Cloud OS has a number of functions:

• Management of the Network, Computing and Storage Capacity: Orchestration of storage, network and virtualization technologies to enable the dynamic placement of the multi-tier services on distributed infrastructures
• Management of VM Life-cycle: Smooth execution of VMs by allocating the resources required for them to operate and by offering the functionality required to implement VM placement policies
• Management of Workload Placement: Support for the definition of workload and resource-aware allocation policies such as consolidation for energy efficiency, load  balancing, affinity-aware, capacity reservation…
• Management of VM Images: Exposing of general mechanisms to transfer and clone VM images
• Management of Information and Accounting. Provision of indicators that can be used to diagnose the correct operation of the servers and VMs and to support the implementation of the dynamic VM placement policies
• Management of Security: Definition of security policy on the users of the system, guaranteeing that the resources are used only by users with the relevant authorizations and isolation between workloads
• Management of Remote Cloud Capacity: Dynamic extension of local capacity with resources from remote providers

OpenNebula is an open cloud OS that provides the above functionality on a wide range of technologies. However, in my view, the main differentiation of OpenNebula is not its leading edge functionality but its open, modular and extensible architecture that enables its seamless integration with any service and component in the ecosystem. The open architecture of OpenNebula provides the flexibility that many enterprise IT shops need for internal cloud adoption. Cloud computing is about integration, one solution does not fit all. Moreover, as pointed out in the CloudScaling “Infrastructure-as-a-Service Builder’s Guide“, the right configuration and components in a Cloud architecture also depend on the execution requirements of the service workload.

Interoperability at the Cloud Management Level

The IEEE defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged” and Wikipedia introduces  interoperability as “the property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together (inter-operate)“. Being the core component in any cloud solution, interoperability is crucial for the success of a cloud management system. We can compare the cloud OS with a the kernel in “traditional” operating systems. The cloud OS represents the basic functions in a cloud and requires a well defined communication with underlying devices and interface to expose administration and user functionality.

At the cloud management level, interoperability means:

• Modularity and flexibility to easily interface with any service or technology in the virtualization and cloud ecosystem, and
• Standardization to avoid vendor lock-in and to create a healthy community around

In fact interoperability should be evaluated from three different angles:

• Infrastructure User Perspective: Users, application developers, integrators and aggregators are requiring a standard interface for the management of virtual machines, network and storage. OCCI is a simple REST API for Infrastructure as a Service based Clouds that is being defined in the context of OGF. This interfaces represents the first standard specification for life-cycle management of virtualized resources. OpenNebula has been the first referent implementation of this open cloud interface, and also implement the Amazon EC2 API.
• Infrastructure Management Perspective: Administrators are requiring cloud OS to inteface into existing infrastructure and management services, so fitting into any data center. OpenNebula provides a flexible back-end that can be integrated with any service for virtualization, storage and networking.
• Infrastructure Federation Perspective: Administrators are requiring cloud OS to manage resources from partner and commercial clouds

With high-end computing demands, cloud operating systems will continue to be a very active field of research and development. An open and flexible approach for cloud management ensures uptake and simplifies adaptation to different environments, being key for interoperability. The existence of an open and standard-based cloud management system like OpenNebula provides the foundation for building a complete cloud ecosystem, ensuring the new components and services in the ecosystem to have the widest possible market and user acceptability.

OpenNebula is being enhanced in the context of the RESERVOIR project, flagship of European research initiatives in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing.

Ignacio M. Llorente

The innovations provided by the OpenNebula open-source toolkit for cloud computing have been presented at CCA09 (Cloud Computing and its Application 2009) in Chicago. The presentation includes a description of the novel functionality  that has been incorporated into release 1.4 to address the technology challenges from the business use cases in the RESERVOIR project, and the ecosystem that is evolving around the OpenNebula open-source community.

Ignacio Martin Llorente

Last Friday, the OpenNebula project announced the implementation of the OGF OCCI draft specification.  The release, that will be part of OpenNebula 1.4,  includes a server implementation, clients command for using the service and enabling access to the full functionality of the OCCI interface, and several supporting documents. The last version of this open source toolkit for cloud computing, available for download in beta release, also brings libvirt, EC2 Query API, and a powerful CLI, and all of them can be used on the same OpenNebula instance, so users can use their favorite interface. In fact, OpenNebula brings support to develop other Cloud interfaces. Moreover all those interfaces can be used on any of the virtualization technologies supported, Xen, KVM and VMware.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) Open Cloud Computing Interface  (OCCI) Working Group was officially launched in April 2009 to deliver an interface specification for managing cloud infrastructure services, also known as Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS. This specification is being driven by the requirements in several use cases. The document Requirements and Use Cases for a Cloud API records the needs of IaaS Cloud computing managers and administrators in the form of Use Cases.

In the last days there has been an intensive discussion on the topic of IaaS Cloud interfaces. There are now three main players in the arena, the Amazon EC2 API, supported by the most well-known cloud computing provider, the VMware vCloud API, supported by the leader in virtualization and submitted to DMTF, and the OGF OCCI API, being defined by an open community in the Open Grid Forum. OpenNebula now implements two of them, EC2 and OCCI, and there is interest in the OpenNebula community in implementing the third interface, vCloud (after all, OpenNebula 1.4 supports VMware). However, the interest of OpenNebula as open-source community is not only to implement an interface specification controlled by a company, but also to contribute to its definition by providing feedback and playing an active role in subsequent versions. In this sense, OCCI-WG is the only open standard sanctioned by a standards body.

While some existing open-source technologies are just implementations of commercial products and interfaces, others open-source technologies such as OpenNebula, are powerful tools for innovation. A Cloud technology should not only be the implementation of an interface, standardized or not. OpenNebula, as technology being developed in the context of RESERVOIR European flagship project in cloud computing, provides many unique capabilities for the scalable and efficient management of the data center infrastructure. Those are the real differentiation in the cloud and virtualization market.

Ignacio Martin Llorente

The 13th DATE conference includes a new topic on “Virtualization Technology”, focusing on the following themes (submission deadline is September 8th).

Topics of Interest

• Server virtualization, IO virtualization, and storage virtualization
• Architectures, systems, tools, methodologies, and algorithms
• (Embedded) hardware architectures and instruction sets
• Single/multi root IOV, address translation and dma remapping
• Binary translation and emulation
• Migration and checkpointing
• Consolidation
• Security
• Isolation, encapsulation, interposition

Topic Chairs

• Andre Brinkmann, University of Paderborn, Germany
• Mike Kreiten, AMD, Germany

Program Committee

• Antonio Asaro, AMD, Canada
• Bernard Homoelle, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Germany
• Richard Brunner, VMWare, USA
• Toni Cortes, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
• Simon Crosby, Citrix, USA
• Odej Kao, TU Berlin, Germany
• Marcel Kunze, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany
• Ignacio Martin Llorente, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Jose Renato Santos, HP Labs, USA
• Kilian Schwarz, Gesellschaft fuer Schwerionenforschung GSI, Germany
• Sascha Uhl, Parallels, Germany

Ignacio Martín Llorente