In just one month, the review of 4CaaSt at the European Commission will take place. This week an integration meeting was held at Telefonica I+D’s HQ in Valladolid.
During the meeting the last aspects of the demo that will be shown in Brussels were integrated. Also a general rehearsal of he presentations took place.
The remaining tasks are almost complete and the morale is very high. We are really confident that we will impress the reviewers!
From 22nd August to 14th September I had the honor to be invited by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to give a series of talks in different Academic Institutions of Beijing and hold meetings with various research groups in order to find possible work lines in common.
These talks provided a general description Cloud Computing and its benefits for the Academic Community. In order to better illustrate these benefits and give possible collaboration ideas, some examples of successful scenarios from our research group where explained in detail. These examples ranged from our participation in EU funded such as RESERVOIR or 4CaaSt, to specific applications such as the iCanCloud simulator or those pertaining to the Mars MetNet Mission.
The venues of these talks were:
The feedback was great and some collaboration opportunities emerged. In words of some Professors from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, “this visit can be considered as the first brick of a bridge between our institutions”.
The University of Tilburg was hosting the third GA meeting of the 4CaaSt Project.
This was the last meeting before the first year review by the European Commission. The discussions conducted these two days helped in the setup of the first year prototype, which will be split in different scenarios with variety and dynamism always in mind.
So now that we can say that everything is decided and under control, let’s cross fingers for the review!
Cloud computing has moved the center of gravity of application distributed execution, by exploiting virtualization at different layers and by adding a complexity level to the scheduling problem. Our dependability on this paradigm has increased to the point where our vital services pertaining to the research, industry or even lifestyle domain have been massively moved onto cloud infrastructures.
Then, what happens when the sky falls down?
In order to provide answers, I am co-chairing with Prof. Rafael Tolosana-Calasanz and Prof. José Ángel Bañares the First International Workshop on fault Tolerant Architectures for Reliable Distributed Infrastructures and Services (TARDIS2011). Also, Prof. Eduardo Huedo is serving at the Program Committee. This workshop will take place in Melbourne (Australia) during the 4th IEEE International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2011), on 5-8 December 2011.
The paper submission system is open and these are the important dates:
Hope to meet you in Melbourne!
Last week the West University of Timisoara (Romania) hosted the 2nd Workshop on Software Services: Cloud Computing and Applications based on Software Services. This edition of WoSS, devoted to Cloud Computing, was co-chaired by Prof. Dana Petcu (West University of Timisoara) and by me.
Being variety our call sign, the event had different types of sessions, not only those where high quality peer reviewed papers pertaining to the regular, position and corporate categories were presented. There were 13 invited talks on EU funded projects, and I gave that corresponding to the 4CaaSt project. Even, attendees had the opportunity to visit the IBM Blue Gene/P that the West University of Timisoara hosts, becoming the first supercomputer ever in Romania.
As the 8th Call for the European Seventh Framework Program is near, the 2nd WoSS was used as an open forum to make interesting ideas come together. In order to spice up this, a SPRERS award (800 Euros in hand) was offered for the best idea presented by a team of new member states for a project proposal for the Objective 1.2 from the Call. The objective focuses on technologies specific to the networked, distributed dimension of software and access to services and data. It will support long-term research on new principles, methods, tools and techniques enabling software developers in the EU to easily create interoperable services based on open standards, with sufficient flexibility and at a reasonable cost.
Writing FP7 project proposals is a great time and energy consuming activity. As it is clear that “(s)he who fails to plan, plans to fall”, we offered a training session which provided the best practices for writing successful proposals. Prof. Dana Petcu, who has a credited reputation in project management and participation, was in charge of this training.
2nd WoSS has been a very intensive Workshop. Its first great achievement was the confluence of many ideas and requirements coming from both academic and industry sides. Its second great achievement was without any doubt that Timisoara hosted a great family meeting. This is the European family with new members that we need to welcome and share our work with.
The highlights of this event have been featured on “HPC in the Cloud”.
You can read them here.
Almost four months after the first General Assembly Meeting in Athens, the 4CaaSt European Project organized another one. This time (April 6th-8th) the meeting took place in Oxford and was hosted by 2nd Quadrant, one of the partners of the Project.
As the end of Year 1 is approaching, the main objective of this meeting was to prepare the demo to be shown during the corresponding review, as well as finishing the deliverables established by the Project roadmap.
As you may recall, 4CaaSt works at the Cloud level of Platform as a Service. For this reason many of us wanted to have a group picture at the Thames river platforms, place were the famous Oxford rowing team (that won this year against Cambridge) has its headquarters:
The “Behind the Cloud” Section from “HPC in the Cloud” has published a blog post where I’m analyzing the parallelism between social networks and cloud computing. The result is the existence of social clouds that provide “Information as a Service” to users, being these users structural parts of the cloud itself. At the end, we find different social cloud providers that match different needs, just like in a scenario offered by public cloud computing infrastructures.
Additionally, I’m providing a recent use case: the important role played by social clouds during the Japanese disaster. You can read the whole blog post here.
Last week I attended a meeting from the Mars MetNet Mission at the Finnish Meteorological Institute HQ in Helsinki. As you will recall from a previous blog post, the objective of this Mission is to establish the next generation observation network for studying its atmosphere, representing this first probe the first “Martian weather station” of many that will come.
During the meeting, latest results from the Phobos tracing application were presented to the Scientific Team. The Amazon public cloud was chosen because of the fast deployment of a powerful infrastructure following a “pay-as-you-go” basis. Choosing a public cloud infrastructure for running Space Mission applications is not new. One year after Mars MetNet, NASA started to use Amazon EC2 as well.
As a result of the meeting, another application was assigned for its Cloud porting. This application processes meteorological data from previous Mars Missions and it will be used for that provided by the future Mars MetNet probes.
Additionally, an article with the complete achievements of this meeting has been featured by “HPC in the Cloud”. You can read it here.
This week, the “HPC in the Cloud” featured an article devoted to our Research Group.
The article is a compendium of the European Research projects we are participating in, as way for understanding which will be the tendencies for 2011. Read it here.
Last week (December 1st-3rd) the 4CaaSt General Assembly took place in Athens hosted by NTUA. There were many expectations put on this meeting as the first demo release is to been prepared shortly and the number of dependencies between work packages is very big. It was clear that e-mails and teleconferences were not enough for certain tasks, so face to face reunions were mandatory.
During these three days, work has been very intensive and meetings lasted almost 11 hours a day. However, this wasn’t an excuse for not continuing the meeting outside the venue and enjoying Greek gastronomy, while doing some partner networking.
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.
