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HPC & AI Wall StreetDuring the second week of June, Timisoara (Romania) hosted the Second Workshop on Software Services: Cloud Computing and Applications based on Software Services. This WoSS event was dedicated to cloud computing and applications using the current major EU Funded Projects as a reference.
The event gave a number of researchers to present sessions that covered a wide area of cloud topics in addition to presentations of high-quality peer reviewed papers pertaining for regular, position and corporate categories were presented. 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.
An invitation in advance of the event was sent to all major EU-funded cloud computing Projects for sending a representative to share with the attendees all the knowledge and best practices gained. The feedback was great, as 13 projects were represented and the discussion that arose after each of them enriched the event.
Automation and Storage in Clouds
During the Cloud-TM presentation, the implications associated with the main choices in the design space of transactional replication protocols were discussed. After this, an ongoing research work was presented, aiming at the development of autonomic mechanisms to self-tune the replication scheme employed in elastic transactional data grids. This is accomplished by exploiting both analytical performance models and machine learning techniques.
VISION Cloud (Dr. Elliot K. Kolodner, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel)
VISION Cloud aims to build a scalable and flexible infrastructure for data-intensive storage services and enablers. This infrastructure will facilitate a new data model to raise the abstraction level of storage, data mobility, computational and content-centric access to storage as well as mechanisms for cost-efficiency with provisions for QoS and security guarantees.
Cloud Security and Open-Source Distribution
StratusLab develops and provides an open-source cloud distribution that allows data centers to expose their computing resources as an ”Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) type cloud. Administrators can run their services over the cloud to improve availability, scalability, and maintainability of their grid and non-grid services. Virtual organizations and users can use the cloud to develop custom computing environments and domain-specific services. The capabilities of the StratusLab 1.0 release and the development roadmap for the second year of the project were presented during the Workshop.
TCLOUDS (Dr. Alysson Bessani, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
The TCLOUDS staring point is how Clouds may evolve into a single point of failure, threaten all dependent ICT, and put the Future Internet at risk. The objective then is to build a resilient Future Internet platform by progress in four areas: addressing the legal and business implications while building a regulatory framework for enabling privacy-enhanced cross-border infrastructure clouds; defining architecture and prototypes for a federation of trustworthy infrastructure clouds that build on complementary and mutually re-enforcing technical approaches; validating through benchmark scenarios; and collaborating with complementary standardization and FP7.
Self-adaption and Legacy applications in SOA
S-CUBE (Dr. Elisabetta Di Nitto Politecnico di Milano Italy)
The S-CUBE project aims to service-based applications as they are able to offer complex and flexible functionalities in widely distributed environments by composing different types of services. These applications have to be adaptable to unforeseen changes in the functionality offered by component services and to their unavailability or decreasing performances. Furthermore, when applications are made available to a high number of potential users, they should also be able to dynamically adapt to the current context of use as well as to specific requirements and needs of the specific users. In order to address these issues, mechanisms that enable adaptation should be introduced in the life-cycle of applications, both in the design and in the runtime phases.
REMICS (Dr. Parastoo Mohagheghi, SINTEF, Norway)
The main objective of the REMICS project is to develop a tool- supported model-driven methodology for migrating legacy applications to interoperable service cloud platforms. The migration process consists of understanding the legacy system in terms of its architecture and functions, designing a new SOA application that provides the same or better functionality, and verifying and implementing the new application in a cloud computing platform suitable for the purpose. REMICS also aims to develop and extend several standards related to knowledge discovery, service interoperability, service modeling in the cloud, and testing and runtime management of services.
Service level in e-Infrastructures
gSLM (Dr. Matti Heikkurinen Emergence Tech Ltd Geneva, Switzerland)
The gSLM project works on Service Level Management (SLM) and Service Delivery Management (SDM), seeking to bring experiences and approaches from commercial ITSM and provide ways to provide them in the grid and e- Infrastructure domain. The project will operate through internal and external workshops, consultation with experts and discussion and collaboration with a range of other projects and initiatives, including EGI, PRACE, IGE, mOSAIC and others. By combining input from these different sources with expertise from the project consortium, gSLM will provide recommendations at a policy level but also at a practical level aimed at e-Infrastructure operators and users.
Cloud SLAs and Management
Cloud4SOA (Dr. Francesco D’Andria, Atos Research and Innovation, ATOS ORIGIN, Spain)
Cloud4SOA aims to face new challenges investigating new service engineering paradigms, methods and tools supporting the development of the Cloud Governance Application in PaaS context. This development includes the process of decision making, criteria and policies involved in the semantic setting-up, construction, negotiation, acquisition, development, deployment, operations, management of a cloud computing capability.
OPTIMIS (Dr. Johan Tordsson, Umea University Sweden)
The OPTIMIS project summarizes its analysis of cloud computing obstacles in five high-level research challenges: service life cycle optimization for improved construction, deployment, and operation of cloud services; adaptive self-preservation with increased autonomy in resource management, enabling fewer administrators to handle increasingly larger systems; cloud and service self-management based on non-functional management criteria, extending beyond typical cost-performance trade-offs to also incorporate aspects of trust, risk, and eco-efficiency in decision making; support for service deployment and operation in multiple cloud architectures such as (bursted) private clouds, cloud federation, cross-cloud service provisioning, and resource mediation by third-party cloud brokers; and market and legislative issues including identification of new market roles and business models for clouds, as well as investigation of legal aspects related to the acquisition, transfer, and storage of service data.
Cloud Resource Management
CONTRAIL (Dr. Yvon Jégou, INRIA, France)
This talk emphasized the research challenges the CONTRAIL project tackles, which are related to security and quality of protection in cloud federations, Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, efficient virtual platform management, and cloud storage. The speaker also presented the project’s approach for building high level storage services and runtimes for elastic applications.
mOSAIC (Dr. Salvatore Venticinque, Second University of Naples, Italy)
The mOSAIC project is in charge of provisioning the collection of Cloud resources, from different providers, that continuously meets the requirements of users applications. According to the available offers, it generates a service-level agreement that represents the result of resource negotiation and booking with available providers. The user is able to delegate to the Agency the monitoring of resource utilization, the necessary checks of the agreement fulfillment and eventually re-negotiations.
4CaaSt (Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
4CaaSt identifies the critical aspects in PaaS adoption by all players, from application developers to end users. This project will bring significant benefits to the European economy, by providing an easy to use Infrastructure for a More Competitive Environment, greatly simplifying design and delivery of tailored services and compositions.
UNITE (Dr. Carlos Agostinho, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Potugal)
With the foreseen research results from the UNITE project, the adoption of advanced techniques for meta‐modeling and automatisms for model and data transformations, will enable to have the engine for interoperability not embedded directly in the systems coding, but through proper adaptive techniques get a suitable characterization of the actual status of the system’s morphisms. This will support predictive system evolution, adding an analysis of its complexity in the dynamics of the network, including the respective transients and systems responsive behaviour. As well, at knowledge level, it is foreseen the need for the harmonization of ontological structures within and between the different network nodes, to permit semantic adaptability for the users specificities and to support the application dynamics. Then, enrichment of the semantic mapping will be possible, as a process to gather, classify, describe and then analyze the semantically features in the domain of the system models, and take better decisions in the advent of uncertainty.
BRAINSTORMING FOR FP7-Call 8
As the 8th Call for the European Seventh Framework Program (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/) is near, the 2nd WoSS was used as an open forum to make interesting ideas come together.
In order to spice up this session, 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 (http://sprers.eu/storage/woss-prg.pdf). 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.
Reviewers for FP7-ICT Calls evaluated the proposals and decided that the one presented by Dr. Viet Tran (Slovak Academy of Sciences) on abstraction layers for Cloud Computing was the winner.
TRAINING ON FP7 PROJECT PROPOSALS
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”, this training session provided the best practices for writing successful proposals. Dr. Dana Petcu, who has a credited reputation in project management and participation (http://web.info.uvt.ro/~petcu/contract.htm), was in charge of this training.
AT THE END
2nd WoSS has been a very intensive Workshop. Its first great achievement is 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.
About the Author
Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti is Assistant Professor in Computer Architecture at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), and a Cloud Computing Researcher at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group (http://dsa-research.org/).
He is (and has been) directly involved in EU funded projects, such as EGEE (Grid Computing) and 4CaaSt (PaaS Cloud), as well as many Spanish national initiatives.
From 2005 to 2009 his research focused in application porting onto Grid Computing infrastructures, activity that let him be “where the real action was”. These applications pertained to a wide range of areas, from Fusion Physics to Bioinformatics. During this period he achieved the abilities needed for profiling applications and making them benefit of distributed computing infrastructures. Additionally, he shared these abilities in many training events organized within the EGEE Project and similar initiatives.
Since 2010 his research interests lie in different aspects of Cloud Computing, but always having real life applications in mind, specially those pertaining to the High Performance Computing domain.
Website: http://dsa-research.org/jlvazquez/
Linkedin: http://es.linkedin.com/in/jlvazquezpoletti/
