XtreemFS 1.4, a new stable release of the Cloud file system XtreemFS, has been released. This release is the result of almost one thousand changes ("commits") to the code repository, and extensive testing throughout the year.

The team worked both on major improvements to the existing code and new features:

• Improved stability: Clients and servers are rock solid now. In particular, client crashes due to network timeouts and issues with the Read/Write file replication have been fixed.
• Asynchronous writes: Once enabled (mount option "--enable-async-writes"), write() requests will be executed in the background. This improves the write throughput without weakening semantics. The team recommends to enable async writes.
• Windows Client (beta): Complete rewrite based on the stable C++ libxtreemfs and using the Dokan alternative Callback File System by EldoS corporation. You can try it by mounting the public demo server.
• Hadoop support: Use XtreemFS as replacement for HDFS in your Hadoop set-up. This version of XtreemFS comes with a rewritten Hadoop client based libxtreemfs for Java which also provides data locality information to Hadoop.
• libxtreemfs for Java: Access XtreemFS directly from your Java application. See the user guide for more information.
• Vivaldi integration: The Vivaldi replica placement and selection policies enable clients to select close-by replicas based on actual network latencies. These latencies are estimated using virtual network co-ordinates which are also visualized in the DIR web-interface. You can check out the demonstration on the web-interface of the public demo server.
• Extended OSD Selection: Now you can assign custom attributes to OSDs and limit the placement of files on OSDs based on those attributes.

This version also includes an updated version of the DIR/MRC replication and adds fail-over support for DIR replicas. As DIR/MRC replication is still in a very early stage this feature is intended as technology preview for more experimental users.

The team is currently at the Supercomputing 2012 exhibition where they present XtreemFS at the Contrail booth #2535 as part of the Contrail project. Since the event takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah, the team decided for "Salty Sticks" as release name for the 1.4 version.

As XtreemFS is an open source project, the team is always looking forward to external contributions and believes that this release serves as an ideal starting point for that. Here's an incomplete list of things you might be interested to contribute:

• chef recipe or puppet configuration for automatic deployment
• a fancy Qt GUI for the client
• S3-compatible interface based on the client library libxtreemfs
• direct integration with Qemu/KVM using the C++ libxtreemfs

At last, the team invites you to fill out the survey if you use/have used/plan XtreemFS.

Release 1.1 contains well tested and secure open source tools.

2012, October 23, Bled - Slovenia - Cloud computing is more and more being used. However, with the increased usage, also issues come up that seem to become more and more of a problem. Two years ago, the Contrail project set out to tackle a number of these very hard to handle problems. Now, after a long development and extensive testing phase the first set of collaborating tools is available. They can be used as independent tools or as an integrated set. Read further

2012, October 23,  Amsterdam - The Netherlands. The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Contrail consortium announced Contrail PaaS (ConPaaS) release 1.0. ConPaaS simplifies the way applications can be started and managed in the Cloud. Until ConPaaS, considerable system administrator skills were needed to deploy applications in the Cloud. With ConPaaS deploying applications making full use of the capabilities of the Cloud requires only a few mouse clicks. Read further

Summerschool 2012 from contrail-project on Vimeo.

If you did not make it to the IoS meeting in Brussels here are the slides of two Contrail related presentations:Contrail: Open Computing Infrastructures for Elastic Services, Yvon Jegou and Roberto G. Cascella. Beyond brokering: Proactive Role of Cloud Federations in Resource Management, Massimo Coppola (CNR-ISTI)

The next presentation by OpneNebula shows Contrail in the context of this Cloud middleware: OpenNebula Interoperability and Portability

Also look at our Twitter stream from the event: https://twitter.com/contrailproject.

Several Contrail partners are present at the Internet of Services event today and tomorrow in Brussels. Please come and talk to us when you want to discuss, for instance collaboration. You can also follow our coverage on twitter.

Contrail will have quite a lot of exposure at the Cloud Assisted Services (CLASS) 2012 Conference in Bled, Slovenia, October 22-25, 2012. The project team will make an important announcement on Tuesday, October 23, 2012. On the same day, our XLAB partner will organize a Contrail tutorial. During the conference, there will be several presentations from Contrail partners.  Project coordinator Christine Morin will provide a talk on "Clouds in San Francisco Bay Area" on October 24, 2012. CLASS Conference visitors will have the opportunity to have a look at the Contrail poster and gather further information in the special CLASS Contrail flyer.  More information is available at http://contrail-project.eu/class-2012-slovenia

The slides from the presentation Task Farming in Cloud Environments under Budget Constraints by Thilo Kielmann at the Clusters, Clouds, and Data for Scientific Computing Conference in France are now available. The presentation explains how a budget-aware task scheduler gives the user control over and choice from several cloud offers.

The Contrail Cloud Summer School just started its third day in a sunny Almere. If you cannot be there, you can download the slides from the website or follow us on Twittter. We already had the city tour; a local Cloud computing afternoon, a scientific day with OpenStack, ConPaaS and XtreemFS. Today we will continue with Task farming, networking and federated identity management.

The Contrail Cloud Summerschool - part of the Summerschool Almere - will start in three weeks. Because we have a lot of applicants, we looked for bigger rooms. This means we now have still a few last minute places left. So If you are interested, contact us  before the end of the week. More information on our special Contrail Cloud Summerschool pages. Almere students will be there to help foreign students with finding their way around town (see the picture taken at the kick-off today of the overall Summerschool Almere).

Contrail, partnering with mOSAIC and EDGI projects, successfully demonstrated the usability of Cloud technology for HPC. There was a well visited booth and a Birds of a Feather session.

Contrail at ISC'12 from contrail-project on Vimeo.

As last year, representatives of the Contrail Project will staff a research booth at the ISC'12 exhibition in Hamburg. We will offer demonstrations of working components and expect to astound you with the solutions offered. Contrail will make using Cloud services real easy. Please come and visit us. You could be our preferred tester or user.

The program for the Contrail Summer School on Cloud Technology is growing by the day. Have a look on our pages or check out the overall program at the Summer School Almere site.

The slides from the presentation Cost-efficient Task Farming with ConPaaS - Bag of Tasks applications on  the PaaS component of Contrail,  at the 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing Platforms are now available.

ERCIM News has published a special issue on Big Data - a hot topic these days. The issue features an article that provides some background on the Contrail PaaS component ConPaaS. It will be used, together with XtreemFS to run Chip-Seq analysis, a type of genomic analysis methodology.

Are you at OGF in Oxford? Do not forget the Science Applications And Infrastructure In Clouds And Grids Workshop on Thursday and Friday. Organised by Jens Jensen (Contrail project), Torsten Reimer, and David Wallom. More info on the SAIGC web page.

At the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds in Taiwan, Jens Jensen from Contrail partner STFC had an oral presentation on "Bootstrapping IaaS and PaaS Security' on Wednesday and one on "The Contrail Approach to Cloud Federations" on Saturday. Look at the full conference programme for more information.

Contrail's Roberto Cascella  presented how federation could help the Internet of Things  at the 4th EU-Japan Symposium on the "New Generation Network" and the "Future Internet" in Tokyo.

Job opening

At the Centre de Recherche INRIA in Rennes (Bretagne Atlantique Campus universitaire de Beaulieu) there's a job opening for an R&D engineer.

Check out our job description and see if you can position yourself at the forefront of Cloud development in Europe. INRIA seeks candidates with a master or engineer degree in Computer Science, or a PhD in Computer Science.

More information: http://www.irisa.fr/myriads/open-positions/researchengineer/position-Contrail-211211
 

With a highly recognizable booth at the SC11 exhibition, our Contrail collegaes draw considerable attention. Both the overal project outcome and the already available components (like ConPaaS) are discussed.

A visual impression.

Contrail will be present at SC11 in Seattle. Please visit us at booth 243.

Nick Trigg from Contrail partner Constellation Technologies, presented   "Bioinformatics on the Cloud Use Case" at the PharmaCloud conference in London. Contrail's security expert Jens Jensen presented "Methods used to increase data protection and security of information in the cloud: at the event.

Imagine your brilliant idea turns out to be so succesful that you need to go from one web server to a thousand in a couple of hours. The Cloud is the answer. But it would demand experts packaging your application and writing scripts to manage the Cloud. Well, this was before ConPaaS. With ConPaaS, bringing hundreds of web servers and application servers on-line is done with no more than a single mouse click. Read the full press-release.

The INRIA team in Rennes is looking for a Research and Development engineer that wants to work on the project Contrail.  The position is available from October 1, 2011. You have to apply by August 20, 2011, the latest.

For more information visit the INRIA Myriads website. Where you can also download a longer job description.

Contrail's Jens Jensen presented "Contrail: Science in the Cloud Challenges & Opportunities" at the Workshop on Science Agency Uses of Clouds and Grids in Salt Lake city colocated with OGF32. You can look at the programme and download the slides from the work shop website.

The Contrail Summer School in the deep south of France was a succes. Insight lectures where given and students from all over the world attended the sessions. And yes, the weather was very fine too. It inspired the attendees to get together for a group photo. And half of them proudly wearing the sky-blue complimentary Contrail polo shirt.

Together with exhibition partners EDGI, mOSAIC and SLA@SOI the Contrail dissemination team staffed a booth at the ISC'11 Exhibition. Many visitors showed interest and look forward to the promising results of the Contrail Project.

Short filmed impression

Contrail's Thilo Kielmann presented  the work on Bag of task scheduling in federated Clouds at the Scheduling in Aussois workshop. With some first results.

An Interview at the AlmereLive channel about Desktop Grids, AlmereGrid and Contrail Cloud federation during the Future Media week in the Netherlands.

An introduction presentation explaining Contrail is available in our download section.

Contrail will present at the conference The dependable Cloud, that will take place in Almere, the Netherlands on April 28, 2011. The venue is the World Trade Centre Carlton Building which is about 30 minutes by train from Schiphol Amsterdam Airport. The conference topics are:The strategic relevance of dependable clouds for the future economy. Customer needs towards future clouds. Advanced solutions and best practice from industrial partners. Showcases of the business value that can be achieved through dependable clouds.  Service Level Agreements as advocated by SLA@SOI are an important conference focus.The Contrail contribution will focus on federating clouds.

Contrail's Jens Jensen provided an overview of security in Clouds at the Cloudcape III conference in Brussels. Contrail also provided a use case for the Siena Roadmap on eInfratructures that support science.

Cloud and Contrail explained in a 3 minute video.

Contrail will organise a Grid and Cloud Summer School in  Hyères, Giens Peninsula (French Riviera), June 27 - July 1, 2011. The Contrail Summer School 2011  will include lectures on modern distributed paradigms such as Grid computing, Cloud computing, and network-centric operating systems. The Summer School will combine lectures from research leaders shaping the future of distributed systems and world leaders in deploying and exploiting distributed infrastructures. Hands-on laboratory exercises and practical sessions using Grid and Cloud software will give participants experience on using modern distributed systems. Summer School website: http://contrail-project.eu/summerschool-2011 .

When visting  CeBIT2011 in Hannover, Digital Agenda Commisioner Kroes was paying special attention to Cloud computing. Of course, she proudly mentioned some of  "her" Cloud flag ship projects: RESERVOIR, OPTIMIS, and Contrail in her news release.

Ben Scholten, Alderman of Economic Affairs of the municipality of Almere, did talk ot Genias, to get informed about the Contrail project and Cloud opportunities for the city of Almere. Visit the Almere city website (in Dutch) for a short report.

A one hour twenty minute tutorial on Bag-of-task-scehduling under budget constraints by Ana-Maria Oprescu and Thilo Kielman is available on the web. You can see the presentation and the slides. Presentation from Cloudcom 2010.

Are you in New Orleans for the SC'10 conference and exhibition? You can meet project coordinator Christine Morin at the XtreemOS booth. She presents the Contrail Project too.

INFRIA Rennes has a job opening for an  R&D engineer position in cloud computing / technical manager to work for the Contrail project. More information on the Job opening

Noticed one more Contrail today in the sky? Could be the Contrail project that started today. Contrail will create an open infrastructure for elastic services. Interested? Wondered? Stay with is on this three year journey