Last week I was invited by the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI) at Moscow to give a talk on cloud computing in the context of our collaboration within the Mars MetNet Mission.

An overview of the technology focusing on our efforts in European FP7 projects (4CaaSt among others) along with our latest achievements in the porting and optimization of critical applications were shown. Also, meetings were held in order to study the possibility of extending our collaboration to other space missions and not only to planet Mars.

Thanks to IKI I had the opportunity to visit the “Star City”, also known as “Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center”, where all astronauts traveling to the International Space Station perform their preparation.

So far, the publications produced by this research line are the following:

• J.L. Vázquez-Poletti, G. Barderas, I.M. Llorente and P. Romero: A Model for Efficient Onboard Actualization of an Instrumental Cyclogram for the Mars MetNet Mission on a Public Cloud Infrastructure. PARA2010: State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing, Reykjavík (Iceland), June 2010. Proceedings published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Volume 7133, pp. 33-42, 2012. Springer Verlag.
• Pilar Romero, Gonzalo Barderas, Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti and Ignacio M. Llorente: Temporal Areographic Patterns of Phobos Eclipses on Mars for the Metnet Precursor Mission. 8th European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2011 (EGU 2011), Vienna (Austria), April 2011. Proceedings published in Geophysical Research Abstracts. Volume 13, EGU2011-6470, 2011. Copernicus Publications.
• P. Romero, G. Barderas, J.L. Vázquez-Poletti and I.M. Llorente: Chronogram to detect Phobos Eclipses on Mars with the MetNet Precursor Lander. Planetary and Space Science, vol. 59, n. 13, 2011, pp. 1542-1550.
• A.-M. Harri, W. Schmidt, P. Romero, L. Vazquez, G. Barderas, O. Kemppinen, C. Aguirre, J.L. Vazquez-Poletti, I.M. Llorente and H. Haukka: Phobos eclipse detection on Mars, theory and practice. Technical Report, 2012 (to be published), Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Our latest work in the context of the Mars MetNet mission has been featured on Datanami, an on-line publication devoted to Big Data. This mission brings together Finland, Russia and Spain, aiming to deploy a meteorological network on the Mars surface consisting in several tens of probes.

This time, the challenge has to do with the data gathered  by NASA’s Viking landers 40 years ago. Its re-process will not only aid in the formulation of valid Martian weather models but also to improve the Cloud framework that will be used for the future data from the Mars MetNet probes.

You can read the full article here.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

The International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds (C4BB4C) will be held at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA2012).

Cloud Computing has acquired enough maturity to expand its field of application to business. Yet there are not only institutions which use this paradigm in their production line but there are also those which are offering services through the cloud.

This workshop intends to put together efforts done from service producers and consumers in order to make Cloud Computing provide an added value to the economy of any kind of institution. Technologies, policies and heuristics will be shared, not discarding those coming from other areas that would benefit Cloud Computing.

The Workshop intends also to focus on how services are delivered through the cloud as a popular strategic technology choice for businesses that provides a flexible, ubiquitous and consistent platform accessible from anywhere at any time.

The interface of software services and cloud computing provides a rich area for research and experience to give a unique insight into how cloud-based service can be achieved in practice. We encourage submissions of research papers on work in the area of Cloud Computing, Service Engineering, and especially welcome papers describing developments in cloud-enabled business process management and all related areas, such as deployment techniques, business models for cloud-based enterprises and experience reports from practitioners.

Extended version of selected papers will be included in a special issue of Scientific Computing: Practice and Experience.

This Workshop couldn’t be possible without the following projects: MEDIANET (Comunidad de Madrid S2009/TIC-1468), HPCcloud (MICINN TIN2009-07146) and 4CaaSt (Gr. Agree. 258862).

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

What’s new in the European research and development area?

The research and development community involved in distributed computing is searching for viable solutions that will increase the adoption of cloud computing. This is the case of the collaborative work done by multi-national teams in the context of the FP7 programme of the European Commission.

Students, researchers and developers working in the field of distributed computing will find in this book a snapshot of the on-going activities in research and development of cloud computing undertaken at the European level. These activities are organized by the latest hot topics of cloud computing research, which include services, management, automation and adoption.

This book is a result of the collaboration with Prof. Dana Petcu from West University of Timisoara (Romania) and among its chapters, the reader will find one devoted to 4CaaSt and another to StratusLab, projects where the DSA-Research group is actively participating.

Detailed Information

Title: European Research Activities in Cloud Computing

Editors: Dana Petcu and José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Date Of Publication: Jan 2012

Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3507-7

Isbn: 1-4438-3507-2

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Every academic year, many students decide to develop their Master Thesis projects at the DSA-Research group, attracted by the idea of working in cloud computing. This technology opens up a world of research possibilities and engenders a fast learning process, allowing the students to develop projects in a reasonable time.

HPC in the Cloud has featured the brilliant work done (or in progress) at the following projects:

• RSA@Cloud: Efficient Cryptoanalysis on the Cloud (2010-2011).
• CONSTRUCTOR: Cloud PaaS for Startups (2011-2012, ongoing).
• POPULOUS: Biodiversity on the Cloud (2011-2012, ongoing).

You can read the full article here.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

After more than one year of joint work between our research group and others from Universidad Carlos III de Madrd (UC3M), Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM), we are happy to announce that our first public beta is ready for download!

iCanCloud is a simulation platform aimed to model and simulate cloud computing systems, which is targeted to those users who deal closely with those kinds of systems. The main objective of iCanCloud is to predict the trade-offs between cost and performance of a given set of applications executed in a specific hardware, and then provide to users useful information about such costs. However, iCanCloud can be used by a wide range of users, from basic active users to developers of large distributed applications.

The most remarkable features of the iCanCloud simulation platform include the following:

• Both existing and non-existing cloud computing architectures can be modeled and simulated.
• A flexible cloud hypervisor module provides an easy method for integrating and testing both new and existent cloud brokering policies.
• Customizable VMs can be used to quickly simulate uni-core/multi-core systems.
• iCanCloud provides a wide range of configurations for storage systems, which include models for local storage systems, remote storage systems, like NFS, and parallel storage systems, like parallel file systems and RAID systems.
• iCanCloud provides a user-friendly GUI to ease the generation and customization of large distributed models. This GUI is especially useful for: managing a repository of pre-configured VMs, managing a repository of pre-configured Cloud systems, managing a repository of pre-configured experiments, launching experiments from the GUI, and generating graphical reports.
• iCanCloud provides a POSIX-based API and an adapted MPI library for modelling and simulating applications. Also, several methods for modelling applications can be used in iCanCloud: using traces of real applications; using a state graph; and programming new applications directly in the simulation platform.
• New components can be added to the repository of iCanCloud to increase the functionality of the simulation platform.

You can download your copy of iCanCloud at its website: http://icancloudsim.org/

Additionally, this collaboration has produced the following research papers so far:

• Alberto Núñez, Gabriel Castañé, Jose Vázquez-Poletti, Agustín Caminero, Jesús Carretero and Ignacio Llorente. Design of a Flexible and Scalable Hypervisor Module for Simulating Cloud Computing Environments. SPECTS’11: International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, pp. 265-270, June 2011, The Hague, Netherlands.
• Alberto Núñez, Jose Vázquez-Poletti, Agustín Caminero, Jesús Carretero, Ignacio M. Llorente. Design of a New Cloud Computing Simulation Platform. ICCSA’11: The 11th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, LNCS 6784, pp. 582-594, June 2011, Santander, Spain.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Last week the 4CaaSt project faced its first year review at the European Commission in Brussels. They were two days devoted to presentations of each work package and live demos of several prototypes.

The feedback provided by the European Commission’s project officer and the reviewers was great. However, the most important outcome besides the good discussions and fair recommendations is that we will be facing many more interesting challenges during the next project year.

Congratulations to all partners for a first year of hard work!

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti