http://www.cs.duke.edu/nicl/acdc09

June 19^th, 2009, Barcelona, Spain

In conjunction with the 6^th Intl. Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications (ICAC 2009)

SCOPE:

Large server farms—from enterprise datacenters and giant-scale Internet services to utility and public cloud computing—are a critical part of the execution platform for many of today’s software programs. Interactive web services, business workflows, large-scale batch data processing, and many scientific computations all run on platforms built atop large server farms. While these systems differ in many ways, they share many common challenges, such as the desire to maximize efficiency and performance while maintaining predictable behavior, power efficiency and fairness, and at the same time responding appropriately to environmental and system changes such as hardware failures and changes in workload.

We believe that solutions to these challenges in performance, reliability and scalability will share many similarities across all variants of server farm infrastructures. In particular, we believe automated techniques will play a critical role in reasoning about and orchestrating the behaviors of these large scale systems. The goal of this workshop is to broadly explore the similarities and differences in current and future policies and techniques in the context of these large server farms.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: February 27^th, 2009

Notification of acceptance: March 27^th, 2009

Camera-ready deadline: April 6^th, 2009

Workshop Organizers:

Program Co-chairs

Jeff Chase, Duke University

Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research

Rich Wolski, UC Santa Barbara

Program Committee

Katerina Argyraki, EPFL

Franck Capello, INRIA

Renato J. Figueiredo, University of Florida

Marty Humphrey, University of Virginia

Randy Katz, UC Berkeley

Mike Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh

Milan Milenkovic, Intel

Partha Ranganathan, HP Labs

Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame

John Wilkes, Google

Topics and Submissions:

We invite authors to submit short position papers or reports of early work related to the automated control of datacenters and clouds. Relevant topics for submission include, but are not limited to:

· Autonomic policies and techniques for improving reliability, performance, scalability and power efficiency of large server farms

· Separation of application concerns from infrastructure, resource, power and other management issues

· Change management and adaptation techniques

· Experience reports on challenges and solutions in large-scale internet services, cloud computing infrastructures, enterprise datacenters and other server farms.

· Experience reports on requirements of high performance data computing, scientific computing, data processing and other applications using large server farms

· Experiences with automatic control strategies, including strategies based on rule systems, strategies economic models, metering-based, control

· Reports on key similarities and difference in autonomic requirements across classes of server farm infrastructures

· Management of network infrastructures within server farms and between server farms

VTDC’09 will be held June 15, 2009, in Barcelona, Spain, in conjunction with ICAC’09 (The International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications)

http://www.grid-appliance.org/wiki/index.php/VTDC09

Important dates

• Submission deadline: February 20th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: March 23rd, 2009
• Final manuscripts due: April 6, 2009
• Workshop: June 15, 2009

Workshop scope

The convergence of virtualization technologies and distributed computing is an exciting development and the subject of much research in both academia and industry, where interest in Cloud Computing environments as a means of provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has grown considerably in the recent past. The VTDC workshop is intended to be a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences on the use of virtualization technologies in distributed computing, the challenges and opportunities offered by the development of virtual systems themselves, as well as case studies of application of virtualization. The scope of “virtualization technologies” includes techniques and concepts to enable virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual data, virtual storage, virtual applications and virtual instruments. The scope of “distributed computing” includes Grid-computing, cluster computing, peer-to-peer computing and mobile computing.

The VTDC workshop brings together researchers in academia and industry who are involved in research, development and planning activities involving the use of virtualization in the context of distributed systems – such as computing clouds and Grids - where the opportunities and challenges with respect to the management of such virtualized systems is of interest to the ICAC community at large.

Topics

VTDC 2009 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Virtualization in data centers and cloud computing infrastructures
• Using virtualization technologies for resource management and QoS assurance
• Security aspects of using virtualization in a distributed environment
• Virtual networks
• Virtual data and storage systems
• Fault tolerance in virtualized environments
• Virtualization in P2P systems
• Virtualization-based adaptive/autonomic systems
• Virtual environment factories and services
• Environment configuration
• Virtual machine management
• Modeling (applications and systems)
• Case studies of applications using virtual technologies
• Deployment studies of virtualization technologies
• Tools relevant to virtualization

Organizers

• General Chair: Kate Keahey, University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory
• Program Chair: Renato Figueiredo, University of Florida
• Steering Committee Chair: Jose A. B. Fortes, University of Florida
• Program Committee: TBD

Barcelona, Spain, 15 June 2009
http://autonomic.ac.upc.edu/GRIDmeetsAC/
In association with
the 6th International Conference on Autonomic Computing & Communications
http://icac2009.acis.ufl.edu/

IMPORTANT DATES
Full paper: 23 February 2009
Author notification: 23 March 2009
Final manuscripts: 6 April 2009

SCOPE
Scientific communities worldwide have constructed massive grids that contain several tens of thousands of CPU’s and several PetaBytes of storage. The complexity of grids has increased due to the large range of dynamic resources involved: hardware and middleware, but also software usage rights, sensors, etc.  Grid applications taking advantage of those resources have also increased in complexity.  In addition, grid usage is based on a sharing paradigm, which introduces the collective behaviour of users as a new complicating factor. A major technical and societal challenge for the immediate future is the stabilisation of production grids.  The control and maintenance of these complex systems to achieve that remain a significant operational issue. Application optimization is similarly challenging.
Autonomic Computing has emerged as a specific scientific domain, with the strong involvement of industry. Autonomic computing is highly relevant to grid systems at a time when production grids have become critical scientific infrastructures and must move to sustainable models. Considering the volume and structure of the manpower dedicated to the day-to-day operations, Self-Optimization, Self-Healing and Self-Configuration could provide immediate benefits.
At the core of the autonomic computing is the fact that high-level goals should be exposed by the middleware and should be easily tuned by users and system administrators. The Workshop will contribute to building bridges between grid researchers on one hand and those in the autonomic computing community on the other. The focus of the workshop is to identify key scientific challenges related to the management and evolution of grids as a specific category of complex large-scale systems. The goal of the workshop is to promote community wide discussion of, and collaboration on potentially high-impact ideas that will influence and foster continued research in improving the manageability and reliability of grids.
The workshop will feature invited presentations from major grid projects and Autonomic Computing scientists as well as regular papers and posters. The format will leave ample time for discussion

PAPER/POSTER SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION
Full papers (a maximum of 8 pages in length) and posters (2 pages) are invited. All manuscripts will be reviewed and judged on merits including correctness, originality, quality of presentation, and relevance to the workshop themes. Please see the conference web site for more information on the submission process. It is expected that the proceedings will be published by ACM.

ORGANISATION
Chair
Cécile Germain-Renaud LRI, France

Program Committee
Mark Burgess Oslo U.,    Norway
Ricard Gavalda UPC, Spain
Charles Loomis LAL, France
Manish Parashar  Rutgers U.., USA
Ron Perrot Queen’s U. Belfast
Omer Rana, Cardiff Univ., UK
Lorenza Saitta UPO, Italy
Jordi Torres UPC, Spain
Ramin Yahyapour Dortmund U., Deutschland

Virtualization plays a key role in the Green and Cloud computing. There are several methods for server virtualization. This video from Infoworld offers a very interesting introductory overview of the three configurations for server virtualization we will discus in the EEDC course: Virtualization, Paravirtualization, OS Virtualization. Enjoy it now. Only 2 minutes of your time required!

Virtualize the servers is not an end point. There are other parts of the IT infraestructure beyond servers in order to enable a more flexible and efficient IT environment: the network. Nowadays network components are also moving toward being virtualized enabling a dynamic virtual environments.

There are already some products in the market that show how it is not just servers that can be virtualized and illustrates how the days of static infraestructure networks will soon be over. For example HP recently introduced the HP’s Virtual Connect architecture,  that enables the user to add more NICs to each server blade without more hardware and provides the ability to dynamically adjust bandwidth for each network connection on the fly. HP product details are posted here. Some initial steps towards the integration of virtualization of servers and networks  can be found in the Citrix XenServer based virtualization solutions. HP integrated Citrix XenServer with HP ProLiant Virtual Console provides a straightforward deployment and management environment that speeds adoption of flexible, cost-saving virtualization technology.

It is true that this is a great step towards a more Green IT. Let’s wait and see how things develop, but  the way I see it, there is still mising an intelligent layer that could manage the complexity that virtualization poses and use resources efficiently.  For example, those virtualized server (acording their workloads) should be able to talk intelligently and dinamically with the network infrastructure if we what to optimize the use of the resources in the Cloud.  My vision is that the solution for this important challenge of building more sustainable and efficient IT is still open and only could have to come from cross-disciplinary studies over a diverse set of research areas.

La virtualització dels servidors i la  xarxa alhora: És necessària  una capa intel.ligent que gestioni la nova complexitat.

La virtualització no s’acaba en la virtualització dels servidors. Hi ha altres parts de les infraestructures TIC  més enllà dels servidors a tenir en compte per tal de permetre entorns TIC més eficients i eficients, la xarxa per exemple. Avui en dia els components de la xarxa també s’estan movent cap a la virtualització permetent entorns virtuals dinàmics.

En aquest sentit ja podem trobar alguns productes en el mercat que mostra que no només els servidors poden ser virtualitzats i il.lustren com li queden els dies comptats a les infraestructures estàtiques de xarxa. Per exemple l’empresa HP recentment ha presentat la seva Arquitectura virtual de connexió HP,  que permet a l’usuari afegir més NIC (Network Interface Connector, part del hardware que permet connectar a una xarxa) a cada servidor sense cap hardware addicional i disposa de l’habilitat d’ajustar dinàmicament l’ample de banda per cada connexió en temps d’execució. Detalls dels productes HP poden trobar-se postejats aquí. Alguns dels passos inicials cap a la integració de la virtualització de servidors i xarxes alhora poden trobar-se postejats en Citrix XenServer based virtualization solutions. HP ha integrat en Citrix XenServer amb HP ProLiant Virtual Console que permet  una senzilla implantació de la gestió de l’entorn que permet aquesta flexibilitat derivada de la virtualització.

Certament aquest és un pas important cap a una computació més sostenible (Green Computing). Esperem a veure com avancen les coses, però tal com jo ho veig encara cal la intel.ligència de tot plegat, és a dir, cal un component que permeti gestionar la complexitat que la virtualització afegeix per tal de fer un ús eficient dels recursos.  Per exemple, els servidors virtualitzats (en base a la seva càrrega) han de poder comunicar-se de manera intel.ligent i dinàmica amb la infraestructura de xarxa si volem optimitzar l’ús dels recursos del “Cloud”. La meva visió és que la solució per aquest important repte de disposar de sistemems TIC més sostenibles i eficients és troba encara per resoldre i passa forçosament  per trobar el punt de trobada entre diferents arees de recerca.

From Smart Mobs we can read that Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts. In fact, many students don’t even want a college e-mail address these days because they already have well-established digital identities before they arrive on campus. I’m sure that the same is happening with new UPC students. For example, in the CARS course that I’m teaching this quarter, 57% of students are using their gmail account to contact with me (homeworks, lab reports, etc.) in spite they have an UPC student account.

Many other colleges and universities have already done outsourcing of their e-mail to Google or to Microsoft (both companies offer such services free to colleges, hoping to hook students on their systems). The companies provide free e-mail with gigabytes of space ( some colleges only allow megabytes!). Colleges that use the commercial services may continue to use their institutional names in their addresses, complete with “.edu” at the end. They can even customize the interface so the Web application looks like part of the college’s site. Colleges that have made the switch report significant cost savings. After all, universities are educational institutions, not technology enterprises.

This is only a provocative post, I’m not supporting this option now, even though this post try to be a warning note: The cloud is here!, also in Barcelona!

A Smart Mobs podem llegir que el Boston College deixarà d’oferir comptes de correu electrònic als nous estudiants. De fet, avui en dia molts dels estudiants ja no volen un compte de la seva universitat perquè ja tenen un identitat digital ben establerta abans d’arribar al campus. N’estic segur que això mateix està passant amb els nous estudiants de la UPC. Per exemple, en l’assignatura CARS que estic actualment donant, el 57% dels estudiants estan usant el seu compte gmail per adreçar-se a mi (pels lliuraments de treballs, informes de laboratori, etc.) , malgrat tots ells tenen un compte de correu de la UPC.

Moltes altres universitats i Colleges ja han externalitzat el seu servei de correu electrònic a Google o Microsoft (ambdues companyies ofereixen aquest servei gratuïtament, esperant enganxar els estudiants als seus sistemes). Actualment aquestes companyies ofereixen el servei de correu electronic gratuït amb Gigabytes d’espai (quan encara hi ha institucions acadèmiques que només n’ofereixen de l’ordre de Megabytes!). Les universitats que usen el sistema comercial poden continuar utilitzant els seus noms i adreces institucionals, amb el “.edu” al final sense cap problema. Fins i tot poden personalitzar les interfícies de tal manera que les aplicacions web semblen part de la web de la universitat. Universitats que han fet el canvi expliquen que han tinguit un significant estalvi de costos. De fet, les universitats són institucions d’educació, no empreses tecnològiques.

Bé, està clar que aquest és un post amb to volgudament provocatiu. Ara mateix no estic pas suggerint que fem això, però crec que a vegades no les podem veure venir, però aquesta vegada està clar que estem avisats: El Cloud ja està aquí!, i tambe a Barcelona!

The October 25 issue of The Economist magazine includes a special report on cloud computing that reviews  the promises and pitfalls of this new model of computing. I recommend to read and enjoy the articles, especially to my friend Rosa M:

Today Microsoft launched Windows Azure, its platform for cloud computing. Microsoft will use the Azure platform to run its own web applications and will also open the platform to developers for building and running their own applications. Acording Microsoft:

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

We have an interesting scenario: Azure will compete with other cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, or force.com.

More information can be found at Microsoft’s Azure site and in this technical white paper.

As you know GoGrid is an alternative cloud platform to the likes of Amazon. GoGrid do publish an API that lets you get at all their controls through a REST based web service. This lets you create your own calls and get moving with it very quickly.  GoGrid give you a $50 free credit, so you can play about with their system at no cost.

Google has filed a patent for a data centers that float in the middle of the ocean and uses the ocean to provide power and cooling.  Google’s latest patent titled “Water-Based Data Center” describes various implementations for deriving power from water while at the same time using water as a method for cooling. Incredible!

…
What’s next? Read the Nick’s predictions of the ten top data center innovations we’ll see over the course of the next year. Why not?

The Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS)  marks an important expansion from the single server virtualization concept and thus a shift in virtualization overall focus. VDC-OS will become part of its virtualization offerings beginning next year and will expands VMware’s suite of virtualization products into new territory.

Dear students, I suggest to read the news from VMware in the VMware official  web page . This page starts showing a new interesting IT diagram stack (the same type of diagrams we used in class).

To realize the full potential of cloud computing, the technology industry must think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences. In my opinion this new step by VMware will have an interesting impact in the Cloud Computing concept even though based on what I have seen so far, there is no consensus on what constitutes a cloud .  Nevertheless remember that the cloud will provide processing, storage, memory, … and they do an interesting kind of analogy with the standard operating system design concepts as reference implementation to what can be done in the cloud scenario. Interesting!

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)

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.

The Gartner Group recently presented their vision of the top ten disruptive technologies  they believe will change the world over the next four years:

•    Multicore and hybrid processors
•    Virtualisation and fabric computing
•    Social networks and social software
•    Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
•    Web mashups
•    User Interface
•    Ubiquitous computing
•    Contextual computing
•    Augmented reality
•    Semantics
Some of these are of particular interest to our EEDC course in the CANS master course as can be reflected in our EEDC’08 workshop today.
Today is the last class and let me again remark that in my opinion “Cloud  Computing” (remember that it means different things for different readers, however it appears everywhere) will grow considerably over the next several years as it enables the sharing of storage and computing infrastructure with others via the Web, including the maintenance and operations (cost-effective approach). I also think we will see application-specific instances of cloud computing on the Web grow considerably, like for example Salesforce has done. Taking in account the list above, and following our class discussions, some of my thoughts are that  multi-core processors and virtualization will mean that companies will need fewer servers, space and cooling systems (consider Oriol’s presentation). Also, applications  can be more easily moved from server to server, or moved from data center to data center and even to an outsourced data center. It could mean that the need for a centralized IT department in a company will go away completely. Companies will no longer need to own/maintain the data centers that they use to run their applications. And with no need to touch a data center directly, will there be no need to have their own IT staff? Of course the IT industry and research will still need IT experts like you.

As you know during this EEDC course I tried to understand how research is going to change IT and transmit this to you. Let me quote a phrase from a post by  J. Anderson that reflects my vision: “The key to your future success is to understand how IT is going to change and what you need to do to change with it”.

I hope that this course has been useful to all of you.  I want to wish you lots of luck in your future careers.

Currently Barcelona is hosting the Open Grid Forum (OFG23). OGF23 is one of the largest and most important events taking place related to Grid and distributed computing technologies. One of the keynote presentations was given by Dr. Werner Vogels, the Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, who is responsible for driving the company’s vision for technology, and must continuously enhance the innovation for Amazon’s customers on a global scale.
I was very interested in attending this presentation (even though it was at 2:00pm, Barcelona lunch time ;-)) because we talked a lot about elastic computing in our course and I think Werner Vogels is a very important person in this field.
The presentation was very interesting (even though a little bit commercial in my opinion). The title was “AHEAD IN THE CLOUD. The power of Infrastructure as a Service” and explained some very interesting things that we already discussed in the course.
One of them, was related with the exercise that we did in the course to try and start a new company using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Remember that in general we only consider the cost of the time to install the hardware (in terms of Euro and time).
He confirmed what we discussed extensively in the course; that today, with the arrival of cloud computing, it is no longer necessary to make a big investment before a company initiates their business.
However, in the course we did not discuss the steps that a company is required to do before a new service can be turned on. He tried to convince us of the benefits of using elastic computing by looking at the traditional chain of actions that have to be done by a company to get some new software running (develop, test, release, install, configure, operate,… which he calls “Software as Bits”), when compared with the “Software as services” model that cloud computing allows. This is a really big issue to take into account also.
I hope that the presentation will soon be available on the OGF23 site and I will notify you to take a glance at it.

Dear students, as we discussed in class, we should consider the “web 3.0” buzzword in the course (EEDC). With the same purpose as the previous post, this post will try to clarify a little what the difference is between web 3.0, web 2.0, … in the context of the EEDC course.

Years ago, when I started my studies in Computer Science we telnetted to a host (we could also consider whether that was “in the cloud”) and ran applications on a host that accessed its data . For example this is how ftp worked. Let’s call that Web 0.0. The revolution that brought the Internet to the masses was the creation of desktop applications. Let’s call that Web 1.0. With Web 2.0 we moved applications off the desktop and into “the cloud”. These web-based applications made it easy to access applications with a browser. From this, multiple companies began introducing new applications in the “cloud”. Also other important companies started to introduce software-as-a-service. Hundreds of startups have launched software as-a-service businesses. In fact nearly every traditional business applicatIon now has an equivalent offered over the net.

However in my opinion there are still some questions remaing which we discussed in class: How reliable is the service and what about the security of the information? This is probably one of the reasons why some people are now moving their web-based applications back to the desktop again (remember that some of you mentioned Adobe AIR , but also consider Google Gears , Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla Prism , etc.). So are we back at Web 1.0 or is this Web 3.0? Clearly it is not Web 3.0.

As we discused with Norbert, Web 3.0 seems to be defined as “Web2.0 + structured semantics for data and services with ontologies”. They refer to the current evolution of the web through new capabilities and functionalities as being a step towards an even more dynamic and intelligent web. The big question though is “how”? We are waiting for the answer in the Norbert presentation ;-).

Dear students, as we discussed in class, we should consider “cloud computing” in the course (EEDC) because we are definitely at an inflection point today whereby distributed computing execution environments turn towards cloud computing environments. However during the first class it was difficult for all of us to find a consensus on the meaning of the word. Probably the only consensus was that it is clearly a buzzword . You know that for me a basic definition is “tot està a l’altre costat” (catalan , “everything is on the network”) (the cloud simply refers to the move from local applications to services on the Internet or web). However this definition is too broad and simple since from it the cloud ends up looking like a collection of Web-based applications, a revival of the thin-client and mainframes model. Currently, the web browser plays a very important role in the provision of online services, however Kevin noticed that some companies (Adobe AIR as example) have a new products that could change this somewhat. We will see! .

Let me synthesize some of the good ideas that appeared in class and I will try to relate them with the basic topics of the course in order to advance the definition and understanding behind the word:

• Students coming form a Grid background, consider that Cloud Computing = Grid computing if the workload is sent to an IT infrastructure that consists of dispatching masters and working slave nodes. This is transparent to the client, who only sees that that the workload has been dispatched to the cloud/grid and results are returned to it.
• However some of you consider Cloud computing = Software-as-Service, where all the applications are somewhere in the web (this is the case of Google apps that we discussed in class).
• Finally, the majority of you agreed with the consideration that Cloud computing = Platform-as-Service, where an external provider maintains the IT infrastructure and the client buys time or resources on this infrastructure (this is the case of Amazon EC2 that we studied in class). This point is more concordant with the view which considers the cloud to be like utility computing, a grid that charges metered rates for processing/accessing time/resources.

Finally some of you referred to the role of different actors that play a different role in this field, and this is orthogonal to what we where discussing in the previous paragraph. I found an interesting post at http://elasticvapor.com/ (which I am reproducing literally here) that in my opinion clarifies the other way to see the cloud:

• Enablers - These are companies that enable the underlying infrastructures or the basic building blocks. These companies are typically focused on data center automation and or server virtualization (VMware/EMC,Citrix,BladeLogic, RedHat, Intel, Sun, IBM, Enomalism, etc) These enables can range from the chip level such as Intel VT, to the hypervisor such as xen or vmware to the orchestration such as 3tera or our Enomalism elastic computing platform.
• Providers - (Amazon web services, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft). The ones with the budgets and know how to build out global computing environments costing millions or even billions of dollars. Cloud providers typically offer their infrastructure or platform. Frequently these “As a Service” offerings are billed & consumed on a utility basis.
• Consumers - On the other side of the spectrum I see the “consumers”, companies that build or improve their web applications on top of existing clouds of computing capacity without the need to invest in data centers or any physical infrastructure. Often these two groups can be one in the same such as Amazon (SQS,SDB,etc), Google (Apps) and Salesforce (Force). But they can also be new startups that provide tools & services that sit on top of the cloud (Cloud management). Cloud consumers can be a fairly broad group including just about any application that is provided via a web based service like a webmail, blog, social network, etc. Cloud computing from the consumer point of view is becoming the only way you build, host and deploy a scalable web applications these days.

Next session we will discuss the next post: From Web 0.0 to Web 3.0: Cloud computing has been around since the beginning of the Internet?

A new paper in cooperation with a research team from IBM Research at Watson Lab in NY have been accepted in one of the important conferences in the area: IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2008). The paper is related with the energy efficient computing, and study the problem of dynamic resource allocation to clustered Web applications.

Utility-based Placement of DynamicWeb Applications with Fairness Goals
David Carrera, Malgorzata Steinder, Ian Whalley, Jordi Torres, and Eduard Ayguadé

Abstract. We study the problem of dynamic resource allocation to clustered Web applications. We extend application server middleware with the ability to automatically decide the size of application clusters and their placement on physical machines. Unlike existing solutions, which focus on maximizing resource utilization and may unfairly treat some applications, the approach introduced in this paper considers the satisfaction of each application with a particular resource allocation and attempts to at least equally satisfy all applications. We model satisfaction using utility functions, mapping CPU resource allocation to the performance of an application relative to its objective. The demonstrated online placement technique aims at equalizing the utility value across all applications while also satisfying operational constraints, preventing the over-allocation of memory, and minimizing the number of placement changes. We have implemented our technique in a leading commercial middleware product. Using this real-life testbed and a simulation we demonstrate the benefit of the utility-driven technique as compared to other state-of-the-art techniques.

Nowadays, business and scientific organizations have a large amount of critical workflow processes that depend upon a set of heterogeneous applications. This set of applications can range from transactional applications, with databases, to non-interactive applications such as those that perform scientific CPU-intensive computing, document indexing or intensive I/O. In order to efficiently execute all these kinds of applications, a new execution environment is required to manage the available resources and simplify the development and integration of different types of applications and services. These middleware components are of crucial importance for new systems and architectures because of their impact on the quality of the service offered by the applications. The EEDC’08 workshop provides an open forum for researchers, practitioners, and users to present discussion issues, directions, and results that will shape the future of execution environments for Distributed Systems, as well as the thoughts from the students in the CANS Masters program at UPC.

This year’s special focus is on the hot topics of next generation data centres and cloud/utility computing. Today we are definitely at an inflection point in the distributed computing: Cloud computing. For this reason we centered this workshop at the “Cloud Computing”.

SOON MORE INFORMATION.

Today Malgorzata Steinder from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center gived an excellent talk “Reducing systems management complexity using server virtualization technology”. Margorzata Steinder is leading the team at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center that is collaborating with our research group at BSC under the Adaptive Systems BSC-IBM SOW. We are very happy to have Gosia with us in Barcelona during this two days.

Gosia presented us how server virtualization opens up a range of new possibilities for datacenter management, through the availability of new automation mechanisms that can be exploited to manage software within virtual machines. Server virtualization permits innovative ways of software distribution inside pre-installed, pre-wired, and pre-configured freeze-dried disk images. Server virtualization also enables powerful and flexible autonomic control, through management software that maintains the system in a desired state in the face of changing workload and demand.

The majority of posts in this category are to help my students and introduce them to the topics related with the Masters course “Execution environment for Distributed Computing ” of CANS Master at UPC.

This course begins the new Master of Research in Computer Architecture, Networks and Systems - CANS as a result of the reform of university courses at UPC within the framework of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Our research group participates activelly in the research course Execution Environments for Distributed Computing. The course focuses on conceptual and practical aspects related with the performance of the middleware that support the execution environments of current High-Performance Distributed Systems.