What books are you planning to read this summer? I’m reading the new novel of Noah Gordon, El Celler (and the Spanish translation “La Bodega”), a story of political intrigue, winemaking, and love, set in Catalonia in the late 19th century.

I’m reading this book for now and I’m currently contemplating which one to check out next. The long hot days of summer provide lots of time to read.

If you love book recommendations like me, here there are another one: “CLOUD COMPUTING: Some of the relevant issues in current Execution Environments for Distributed Computing” (Lulu.com publisher, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-4092-1787-9).

This book is composed by 8 chapters and it is the result of a surveys done by master students on different areas related with the “Execution Environment of Distributed Systems” course in the CANS master program at the Technical University of Catalonia (Barcelona, UPC). Taking into account the interest of this issues, it has been decided to publish it as a book. I am very grateful to them for their patience and accepting this challenge. I ask to the reader to keep in mind that this is an academic exercise done by students, not a research work done by researchers, and that none of the authors are English native speakers. Please be generous if you find some mistakes that may escape our revisions. This year’s special focus of the course is on the hot topics of next generation data centres and cloud/utility computing because we are definitely at an inflection point today whereby distributed computing execution environments turn towards cloud computing environments. You can order a Hardcover copy at lulu.com bookstore or download a free electronic copy from this link.

If you love book recommendations, here you have two options! Have a good summer vacation. 

As usual while doing our PhD master course EEDC at UPC, I encouraged my students to review current blogs so they could follow the transformation of IT and identify the visionary people they consider close to their research areas. Let me suggest that you follow Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s excellent blog site.

At the moment Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a Chairman Emeritus at IBM Academy of Technology and a Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is involved in multi-disciplinary research and teaching activities that focus on how information technology is helping transform business organizations and institutions within society. He is really a visionary of the changing nature of innovation and the future of information technology.

I meet him in September 2003, when he was IBM vice-president, during a meeting of  the board of managers of the CEPBA-IBM Research Institute (the BSC embryo) and him, to try and show him Barcelona’s potential for research. I was really impressed with his vision of IT. Thanks to him Barcelona host one of the biggest supercomputers of the world at BSC.

I especially recommend that my former students, and obviously everybody interested in the future of IT, read the last post entitled “What is Cloud Computing, Anyway?”. This is by far the best post I have read about Cloud Computing up to now.

(photo from Barcelona IGC 2005 Conference, when Barcelona Supercomputing Center was created)

Last week David Carrera did the PhD presentation obtaining the maximum mark. The thesis contributes to the performance management of a complex application server execution environment using autonomic computing issues. The work was coadvised by Eduard Ayguadé and myself and is framed in a collaboration with one IBM Research Group at Watson Labs (leaded by Malgorzata Steinder) and BSC.

Congratulation to David for their excellent work.

Here you can find the PDF file of the PhD dissertation.

As I said to my former EEDC master students, I will continue writing about some of the important topics that appeared in the EEDC master course after it has finished to try and keep them in contact with some of the advances in the area. One of these is Cloud Computing, because it continues to be a very hot subject, even though there is still no real consensus in the community about what cloud computing really is. Recently I finished reading Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. As you probably know, Nicholas Carr describes how a hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power with steam engines and generators and plugged into the newly built electric grid. According to the author, a similar revolution is under way today. Companies are dismantling their private computer systems and tapping into rich services delivered over the Internet, turning computing into a utility and ultimately shifting towards cloud computing . I agree with the author that it will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did (not only in the IT industry). As my students know, I do not agree that Cloud Computing is only a buzzword (even though it is). I feel that cloud computing is one of those massive changes in the IT world that I have already seen as a member of the IT community; like that of the arrival of the PC in the 1980s or the Web in the 1990s. Now in the 2000s, it is time for a new big IT trend, which will inevitably transform the IT industry and society where millions of heterogeneous devices will cooperate through an intelligent layer over the internet. In my opinion this new IT trend will allow the complexity to be hidden from millions of people, who care nothing for computers or technology, and enable them to do things they had never been able to do before.

Dear EEDC students,

According to Wikipedia [1], in computing, the term stream is used  in a number of ways, in all cases referring to a succession of data elements made available over time.

Nevertheless, I will consider as ** stream computing  the process of analyzing multiple data streams from many sources, live. As data we can consider : conversations, television programs, music, movies, stock trades,  commodities values, medical images, shopping lists, test results, …. It is the stuff that drives the scientific, economic, and social engines of our society (a 2007 IDC study estimates that the world  generated 161 billion gigabytes of digital information) [2].  Nagui Halim in [2] described the fundamental  difference between the computing that most of us do every day, and stream computing: “In traditional computing the machine dictates the pace at which things gets done. In stream computing, the  machine’s job is to figure out what’s going on in the real world in real time”.  This computing model appears today in real-time monitoring of  complex industrial processes and represents one of the most significant challenges in the coming years.

Why do I state to solve Stream Computing challenges requires  cross-disciplinary research?  Streaming computing not only requires High Performance Computing facilities to process this huge amount of data. Moreover Stream computing requires mathematical algorithms that can analyze the data in real time as it streams in to increase speed and accuracy when dealing with data handling and analysis. I’m sure  that Stream computing is another example where the complexity of modern systems required by society requires cross-disciplinary studies over a diverse set of research areas.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_(computing)

[2] http://www.hpcwire.com/features/IBM_Looks_to_Tap_Massive_Data_Streams.html

Vas is a Technical lead and the Virtualization Strategic Initiative Manager in the Virtualization Runtime & Tools Department. Vas presented us with an interesting talk about Virtualization technology and how it is driving profound changes in the way large data centers are designed and managed. Moving to a virtualized infrastructure solves many problems such as hardware utilization and power consumption. But it also creates many new problems such as virtual machine image sprawl and a new management layer in the IT stack. The talk included an interesting overview of the emerging trends in the industry by the adoption of virtualization, followed by an IBM Research perspective of what new technical challenges this creates.