This is the abstract:

Integrating diverse grid technologies is an essential step toward a universal grid. With this taxonomy, researchers can better understand how single grids use metaschedulers and what must be done to make multiple grids interoperable.

We hope you find it interesting!

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

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.

• 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

Logo of Mars MetNet Mission

One of the aspects to take into account during the probe operational lifetime are the effects of Phobos‘ eclipses. Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, orbits at approximately 9,000 Km from Mars, being its period 7 hours and 39.2 minutes. The prediction of each eclipse is important for the onboard instruments and it evidently depends on the landing coordinates, which won’t be exactly known until few hours before.

For this reason, an application has been developed at the Faculty of Mathematics of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which traces Phobos’ trajectories given the coordinates and the required time.  Execution times were too high to consider traditional computing solutions, but the tracing period could be divided at will. This way, the problem could be parameterized and the resulting distributed application, executed on the Cloud.

Answering the question of which and how many resources must be instantiated on a public cloud to obtain a compromise between the time and cost, a valid model for executing this application on Amazon EC2 has been formulated. Depending on the required simulation time, the model returns the best task tracing period along with the number and type of virtual machines.

Phobos' eclipse caught by NASA's rover Opportunity

As a result of this collaboration, the present work has been accepted for its presentation under the title “A Model for Efficient Onboard Actualization of an Instrumental Cyclogram for the Mars MetNet Mission on a Public Cloud Infrastructure” at the PARA2010: State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing Conference, that will be held in Reykavík (Iceland) on June 6-9, 2010.

From similar stories, it seems that Cloud Computing is aiming beyond the clouds.

We are very excited about this great opportunity to work with very talented and self-motivated students. During the summer the students will be part of our community, and will have the opportunity to learn the basics of virtualization, cloud computing and OpenNebula.

If you are a student, and would be interested in participating in GSoC with OpenNebula as your mentoring organization, please take a look at our GSoC Ideas page.  This page lists projects that OpenNebula has proposed for GSoC, but it is not a closed list.  If you have an idea for a cool project that uses or extends OpenNebula, please contact one of the OpenNebula  GSoC mentors.  Also, if you are teaching distributed/cloud computing or related courses please share this information with your students.

Once you are ready to submit an application, remember that you must do so before April 9th through the GSoC webapp. So come and join us this summer to improve the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit!

Ruben S. Montero

• Community, a whole new space for the OpenNebula community. There you can find information on how to contribute, the OpenNebula users or the ecosystem… Also we have started the ecosystem catalog to collect all the projects and initiatives of the community.
• Mailing Lists We have created two new mailing lists: announce, a lowtraffic list for announcements; and ecosystem to discuss of cloud components, projects and cloud solutions…
• New VCS we have migrated the source repository to git. You can view the new git repo or find instructions to check out the source in dev.opennebula.org.

The OpenNebula Team

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. 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