The new Contrail release is made for the security enthusiasts who wish to know more about securing the access to a federated Cloud infrastructure. The focus of this release is to provide the building blocks that will enable fine-grained security and which will be used in the final release of the Contrail platform. The developers demonstrate the usage of external Identity Providers with a Single Sign On (SSO) feature and the usage of OAuth tokens as a basis for the next release.

What's new in the release?
- Support for external Identity Providers (for example allowing login over Google)
- Support for SAML (exchange of attributes during login)
- Support for OAuth2 standard (securing API with OAuth tokes between the component calls)
- Authorization Server (fine grained control of token usage for the users and administrators)
- Dynamic-CA (for temporary services such as software defined networks SDNs for applications)
- Bug fixes of existing components

Release R1.3 builds upon a previous release which introduced:
- SLA Manager on the provider level,
- Virtual Infrastructure Network (VIN),
- Federation updates to reflect additional functionality (SLA and VIN support),
- Updates have been made to the security part as well, adding basic OAuth 2.0 functionality.

Contrail previous releases allow a Cloud administrator to offer basic SLA functionalities at the provider level on top of the deployment of applications on a data centre. Virtual networks are also possible with proper OVFs.
This release of the Contrail software stack only indicates some basic workflow of SLA passing between the federation and the provider.

The developers currently support the following systems:
- Debian 6.0
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Software requirements:
- current version supports virtualization on OpenNebula clusters only.

Downloads for both unix distributions i386 and amd64, in integral or individual packaging are available at http://contrail.projects.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Download
Release notes are available at http://forge.ow2.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=2265
Updated guides are available at http://contrail.projects.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/WebHome

The VEP team is proud to announce VEP v2.1 (download link here ), a new version replacing the old one (v2.0) adding new features and fixing the known bugs. The supported features are:

• OpenNebula: VEP allows to manage a OpenNebula Cloud System offering a completely transparent interface
• Open Standard support: VEP respects the DTMF OVF and CIMI standards
• Data centre representation: VEP stores the provider datacenter layout to enforce some SLA requirements
• Physical resource allocation and resource provisioning for end user’s applications
• Easy interfaces: easy browser based cloud administrator and end-user application management interfaces
• VM Scheduling: the new VEP scheduler is independent from the IaaS Scheduler to allow placement constraints on the resources
• Advance Reservation: VEP allows to reserve a number of VMs from a start date to an end date to guarantee the deployment (in addition to run an application in best effort mode)
• Web User Interface: VEP provides an easy web interface where the user can improve his experience using the special tool
• Remote Storage: VEP allows to create remote storage using GAFS or to mount an already existing storage
• OAuth Support: VEP includes an OAuth client to retrieve a delegated certificate to use inside the created VMs

An Installation Guide and a User Guide is available at the VEP project site (https://project.inria.fr/vep/documentation/).

 Roberto Cascella from Contrail-partner INRIA in Rennes, France presented the Contrail approach for interoperable Clouds during the Cloud Interoperability Week taking place in Madrid, September 16-20, 2013. He told the audience that Contrail aims at developing an integrated approach to the virtualization offering by providing services for federating IaaS Clouds and by offering PaaS services on top of federated Clouds. Contrail has built an open source Cloud computing software stack which is compliant with Cloud standards. The slides of Roberto Cascella's talk can be downloaded from the Contrail website.

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.

The rapid evolution of the cloud market is leading to the emergence of new services, new ways for service provisioning and new interaction and collaboration models both amongst cloud providers and service ecosystems exploiting cloud resources. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) govern the aforementioned relationships by defining the terms of engagement for the participating entities. The European Commission has issued a report following the Workshop on "Cloud Computing SLAs in FP7 - Exploitation of Research Results", organised by the unit CONNECT E2 "Software & Services, Cloud" of the European Commission in Brussels on 27 May 2013. The download is now available.

Virtual Execution Platform is a Cloud middleware software that interfaces multiple Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. VEP offers two types of services:

1. management of data centres for a Cloud administrator allowing greater control on the physical resources;
2. management of end-user distributed applications made up of several inter-networked virtual machines on a Cloud with an interface facilitating the deployment and application lifecycle management.

The VEP team is proud to announce VEP v2.0 (download link here), a new version replacing the old one (v1.1). The supported features are:

• OpenNebula: VEP allows to manage a OpenNebula Cloud System offering a completely transparent interface
• Open Standard support: VEP respects the DTMF OVF and CIMI standards
• Data centre representation: VEP stores the provider data centre layout to enforce some SLA requirements
• Physical resource allocation and resource provisioning for end user’s applications
• Easy interfaces: easy browser based Cloud administrator and end-user application management interfaces
• Application snapshot: creation of OVF file to redeploy the application at a later time or in another data centre
• VM Scheduling: the new VEP scheduler is independent from the IaaS Scheduler to allow placement constraints on the resources
• Advance Reservation: VEP allows to reserve a number of VMs from a start date to an end date to guarantee the deployment (in addition to run an application in best effort mode).

VEP aims at offering the full management of IaaS Cloud while shielding the administrators from the complexity of managing heterogeneous resources. VEP is designed to provide interoperability by offering a uniform way of representing and managing the resources of a Cloud provider. VEP could also easily enable the participation of a Cloud provider to a federation seamlessly and it does proper VM contextualization and application lifecycle management. Additionally it publishes application events and metrics for application’s monitoring and SLA enforcement.
VEP enables interoperability through its RESTful interface based on the DMTF’s Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) standard. The CIMI model defines a framework for the application life cycle management on a Cloud provider infrastructure, with applications generated from an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) document. VEP extends the CIMI API to support the deployment of applications under SLA terms.

VEP RESTful interface allows Cloud administrators to manage and control numerous aspect of the service offering. For VM scheduling to work properly, the data centre topology information is desired in VEP. The software has a simple and intuitive interface to allow administrators input topology information about their data centre. This interface also permits the administrator to selectively permit hosts to be managed via the VEP software. VEP never schedules a VM on a host not permitted for use by the administrator.

An Installation Guide and a User Guide is availabe at the VEP project site (https://project.inria.fr/vep/documentation/).

The VEP team is working hard to make VEP an even better system; the Openstack support is around the corner.
Stay tuned for the the next releases.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Contrail consortium have launched Contrail PaaS (ConPaaS) release 1.2.  This release extends ConPaaS with multi-cloud deployment, and support for complex applications. Read further.

Contrail's Jens Jensen provided a Lightning Talk at the TERENA Conference in Maastricht, The Netherlands, about Federated Identity management experiences from Contrail and EUDAT. You can check out the video archive. (Jens' talk starts at 52:10.)

This year Almere will once again host a Cloud Computing Summerschool that will bring together students from all over the world. Keynote lectures will be given by leading European Cloud experts and major Cloud projects such as Contrail. Hence, students get lectures from the persons that are paving the way to the Cloud. All information about the programme and the registration procedure are available at http://contrail-project.eu/summerschool-2013

On April 15, 2013 Contrail partner XLAB offered a presentation and demo at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, USA. The focus of the talk was the explanation of Contrail's idea, that it is a tightly integrated open source  software stack including a comprehensive set of system, runtime and high level services providing standardized interfaces for supporting cooperation and resource sharing over Cloud federations. After the talk there was some interest expressed from the audience of around fifty people attending the talk, mainly regarding the support for advanced SLA terms in the deployment of applications through the Contrail portal. Luka Zakrajsek from Koofr also presented the idea of Koofr and how it could help with its hybrid cloud storage API as a provider of image-storage provider. The live demonstration of Koofr went flawlessly. More details are available at http://contrail-project.eu/openstack-summit

This document contains the release notes for Contrail version 1.2. The following sections describe the release in detail and provide other information that supplements the main documentation linked at the end.

This is an early access release for wide evaluation and usage. Your feedback is important to us, please help make this the best product possible. Contrail http://contrail-project.eu/ develops an 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.

This is the third public release of the software stack and is thus targeted to the researchers and technology enthusiasts. It extends the functionalities of previous public releases.

The software was released on 16th April 2013.

What's new in the release?

- SLA Manager on the provider level,
- Virtual Infrastructure Network (VIN),
- Federation updates to reflect additional functionality (SLA and VIN support)
- Updates have been made to the security part as well, adding basic OAuth 2.0 functionality.

A Cloud administrator now can offer basic SLA functionalities at the provider level on top of the deployment of applications on a data center. Virtual networks are also possible with proper OVFs. Security has been improved with an enhanced CA service and integration of delegation mechanisms supporting OAuth2 standard. This release of the Contrail software stack only indicates some basic workflow of SLA passing between the federation and the provider. The release serves as a basis for the next one, which will provide the API functionality of current release directly to the user.

Installation Notes

Installation

See the Installation Guide [1] for full details. Please look at the Administration Guide [2] for further administration details.

We currently support the following systems:

- Debian 6.0
- Ubuntu 11.04
- Ubuntu 11.10
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Software requirements:

- current version supports virtualization on OpenNebula clusters only.

The User's Guide [3] describes the basic usage and functionality of the system.

For contact and any help, please send an e-mail to the .

Contrail Consortium

[1] Installation Guide: http://contrail.projects.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/download/Documentation/WebHome/InstallationGuide.pdf
[2] Administration Guide: http://contrail.projects.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/download/Documentation/WebHome/AdminGuide.pdf
[3] User's Guide: http://contrail.projects.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/download/Documentation/WebHome/UserGuide.pdf

The Contrail participation in EGI-CF Manchester did attract a lot of attention. The slides are now available.

Currently, members of the Contrail team are presenting demonstrations and distributing flyers in the Contrail booth at EGI CF in Manchester. There is also a poster from STFC on show titled "Small Angle Neutron Scattering in the Cloud". On Friday, 12 April, 2013, Contrail is offering its tutorial "Contrail Cloud Middleware Support for EGI Community Platforms" from 11h00 to 12h30.  If you are participating in EGI CF, please drop by.

Last Friday the society "Dutch Health Hub" was inaugurated in Almere. The Dutch Health Hub is a community Cloud for the Dutch health sector,  based on Big Data. Contrail tools are used in a test bed of the Dutch Health Hub operated by AlmereGrid. These were explained as part of a demo set up in Almere.

2013, February 4, Amsterdam - The Netherlands - The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Contrail consortium have launched Contrail PaaS (ConPaaS) release 1.1. Until ConPaaS, considerable system administrator skills were needed to deploy applications in the Cloud. ConPaaS simplifies the way applications can be started and managed in the Cloud. With ConPaaS, deploying applications making full use of the capabilities of the Cloud requires only a few mouse clicks. Read further.

The ConPaaS team is very proud of the new ConPaaS-1.1 release. Thanks to the newly introduced functionalities the team is now ready to start eating their own dog food, and to rely exclusively on ConPaaS technology to host the www.conpaas.eu website. The ConPaaS team in Amsterdam instantly took his word seriously and organized a grand dinner where "ConPaaS dog food" was served.

The Contrail White Paper "Overview of the Contrail system, components and usage" is available at http://contrail-project.eu/documents/18553/341152/WhitePaper.pdf

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