The Contrail project team is organizing a Contrail Contest Competition in the framework of the Workshop on Dependability and Interoperability in Heterogeneous Clouds (DIHC13), collocated with Euro-Par 2013, on August 27, 2013 in Aachen, Germany. The deadline for registration and code submission is August 10, 2013. The winner will be notified on August 15, 2013.

Contrail brings a number of important features to Cloud administrators and users. With the Contrail software a Cloud administrator now can manage a Federation of Clouds providing support for basic SLA functionalities at the provider level on top of the deployment and management of the entire life-cycle of applications on a data centre. A user accesses the Federation Web, which is completely integrated with authentication and authorization functionalities, meaning that user login obtains proper OAuth tokens that can be used for other calls.

Applications are described via proper OVFs, where virtual networks can also be specified. A Contrail user can also access PaaS services via the ConPaaS component, designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and on-line Web applications. Contrail is available either as integrated software or as a set of individual components: ConPaaS (PaaS services), Security (authentication and authorization), SLA life-cycle management, VEP (data centre and application management), VIN (virtual networks), GAFS (reliable distributed storage).

Contrail is a European project addressing interoperability and dependability to allow a federation of heterogeneous Clouds to deploy distributed applications under QoS and QoP constraints. Contrail is an open source integrated approach to virtualization, offering Infrastructure as a Service services (IaaS), services for federating IaaS Clouds and Contrail Platform as a Service services (ConPaaS) on top of federated Clouds. The aim of the project is designing, implementing, evaluating and promoting an open source computational Cloud wherein users can limitlessly share resources. The Contrail is at the third public release of the software stack and is thus targeted to the researchers and technology enthusiasts.

The contest competition shall provide a forum to present and discuss the use of Contrail software: new applications using the Contrail software stack or some of its components, demonstration testbed of an existing application ported on Contrail, new tools that interoperate with and integrate Contrail software.

Submissions should be in the form of a package including the code accompanied by a two-pages proposal providing informal description of the demonstration (consisting of an application or tool), which parts of the Contrail software have been used, the experience in installing and using the Contrail software and advantages (if any) of using the Contrail software, what attendees will be able to see or do during the demo (e.g. screenshots). The same document must provide information about any equipment or facilities required for your system demonstration.

All submissions will be evaluated mainly based on the quality of work, novelty of the application or tool, the potential to stimulate interesting discussions, exchange of ideas and promote collaborations.

The winner of the competition will present at the DIHC 2013 workshop to present the application/tool and work accomplished. The winner will also be invited to submit a paper to be published in the post-proceedings of the workshop. More information will come after the workshop.

The DIHC 2013 workshop aims at bringing together researchers from academia and industry interested in the design, implementation, and evaluation of services and mechanisms for dependable Cloud computing in a multi-­Cloud environment.

Detailed information is available at the Contest website.