Technical Tour Almere

This walking tour will guide you among several technology places related to Cloud technology in Almere. We will stop at:

 Lunch

EGI Federated Cloud 
The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is the result of pioneering work that has, over the last decade, built a collaborative production infrastructure of uniform services through the federation of national resource providers that supports multi-disciplinary science around the world. EGI's resource centres have been providing grid services for collaborative, compute- and data-intensive applications for over a decade. Besides the well-established ‘grid infrastructure', several resource centres started offering privately run 'Infrastructure as a Service' clouds to their institutional or national researchers. These clouds are for some classes of user more attractive than the grid as they are more easily able to support different application design models and hence new classes of user would have access to the infrastructure. We have seen that many of the cloud users recently expressed interest in sharing applications and services from these clouds at the international scale. To facilitate the setup of a pan-European cloud infrastructure the EGI-InSPIRE project established a Federated Cloud activity in September 2011 where the connection and interfaces used are recognised open standards. The activity identifies and tests technologies and explores current standards that can enable a multinational federated cloud based on resources from both academic and commercial sectors. This presentation will provide an overview of the EGI Federated Cloud concept, its enabling technologies, its current status and future plans towards a production quality infrastructure. The  processes whereby cloud operators and scientific communities can engage with the EGI Federated Cloud activities will be also outlined.

16:00-16.45

The Dutch Health Hub is an initiative in the Netherlands to enable the sharing and use of medical and health big data in the Netherlands across the country. Using big data in this setting requires a federation of clouds. Several Cloud federation tools that have been developed as part of the EC project Contrail are being deployed as part of a Dutch Health Hub project called DHH-IPC. Experiences with the deployment of Cloud tools as part of the Dutch DHH-IPC test bed are being reported.

Keynote: Federated identity management & Cloud security

Federated identity management is one of the hottest topics in research infrastructures: as researchers increasingly need to share resources to manage large data volumes or participate in multiple projects, easening the burden by providing single sign on and persistent identity management.  Although pushed strongly by academic institutions across the world, it is no less relevant for, say, the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, cloud and online services providers such as Google and Yahoo provide OpenID identities which enable collaborations, and can be reused.  Building federations is a curious mix of technology, trust, federation policies, ease of use, user culture and habits, law, support, resource management and accounting, etc.  As all these have to work over a distributed infrastructure, more often than not crossing borders, security plays a strong role.  This presentation will primarily look at the available and emerging technologies, focusing on the pragmatic aspects: things that work in practice... Technologies covered include Shibboleth, Moonshot, credential conversion, the role of X.509 certificates, bootstrapping the federated infrastructure security, scalability, and delegation. (t.b.c)

VEP allows deployment of applications described in an OVF file over OpenNebula clouds.

Core Cloud Federation

Federations of Clouds allow flexible usage and combinations of services from several Clouds. This allows avoiding vendor lock-in, support for Cloud bursting and other use cases.

ConPaaS: an integrated runtime environment for elastic Cloud applications

Cloud computing offers a very flexible and cost-effective environment for hosting demanding applications. However, making use of these advanced functionalities can be tedious and error-prone: application developers must therefore handle the complexity of deploying applications composed of many inter-related components, implementing automatic resource provisioning, orchestrating application reconfigurations such that users do not notice any downtime, developing fault-tolerance mechanisms, etc. This presentation will introduce ConPaaS, an open-source runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud which aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud. ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and online Web applications. It automates the entire life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development, deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. Finally, it runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and is easily extensible. This allows developers to focus their attention on application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details.

The hands-on sessions will provide a valuable addition to the presentations. The students can explore a number of Cloud concepts on a real complex federated Coud. Please bring a laptop so you can access the Cloud from your own machine. There is also computer lab with machines available.

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular solution to provide cheap and easy access to elastic computing and storage resources. However, a key drawback of current Cloud models is that they do not allow interaction with the physical world. New research directions intend to contribute to the creation of a pervasive infrastructure where new generation services interact with the surrounding environment, collecting data and applying management strategies. By adding sensors and actuators into the mix, new opportunities arise for contextualization and geo-awareness.

This scenario is highly dynamic, also involving mobile devices that randomly join and leave, an issue that can be adequately addressed resorting to volunteer contribution paradigms.

The main objectives of this talk are:

1. abstracting and virtualizing sensing devices to be offered as Cloud-enabled infrastructure
2. enabling a volunteer-based approach for sensing Clouds, exposing devices provided by both mobiles and sensor networks
3. developing mechanisms and tools for customization of resources with the aim of supporting value-added sensing applications and new generation services development and deployment.

Enabling technologies towards the envisaged goals are: abstraction and virtualization of sensors and actuators; volunteer techniques for enrolment, autonomous management and distributed coordination; Cloud-like, service oriented interfaces and fruition; software engineering techniques, methodologies and APIs.

This talk aims to unlock innovative and value-added services by seamlessly bridging sensor networks and ubiquitous nodes such as mobiles. Sensing and actuation resources are to be abstracted and virtualized in order to be provided under the guise of services, thus enabling a Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) paradigm.

Given such background, this talk intends to present a comprehensive framework implementing tools for smart devices integration, configuration and management in a Cloud-like fashion and service development. Two case studies will be specifically addressed: one related to Crowd Flow Control (CFC) and the other to Smart Energy Management (SEM).

Service level agreements are essential when trying to combine services from different Clouds or when getting different services through Cloud brokering. Implementing SLA's is difficult because it has to work on all levels in the different Clouds and in the Cloud federation. This lecture will concentrate on SLA's in federated Clouds.

XtreemFS - a Cloud file system 

Cloud computing poses new challenges to data storage. While cloud providers use shared distributed hardware, which is inherently unreliable and insecure, cloud users expect their data to be safely and securely stored, available at any time and accessible in the same way as their locally stored data.

As a solution, we will present XtreemFS in this talk. XtreemFS is a POSIX-compliant file system for the cloud. It transparently supports advanced features like replication and distributed snapshots. A detailed description of the internal architecture of XtreemFS and its security concept will be given. Additionally, a comprehensive overview of the replication and snapshot protocols will be presented. The talk will conclude with a description how the presented XtreemFS features are used in practice at the example of a cloud provider.

The Consumers of Cloud resources are often complaining about the non-portability of Cloud applications and the vendor lock-in. In this context the role of the third parties as mediators between the Consumers and Providers is starting to be delineated. They build ad-hoc grouping of Cloud resources to satisfy application requirements to use various resources from Public, Private or Hybrid Clouds. Such requirements are related to the migration from one Cloud to another, Cloud bursting, or consumption of particular services. The talk will be oriented towards:

1. the taxonomy of multiple Clouds (Federations, Multi-Clouds, InterClouds);
2. overview of the available Cloud management software for Multi-Clouds;
3. gaps between requirements and offers;
4. case study: an open-source and deployable PaaS for Multi-Clouds, with live demos.

One afternoon will be dedicated to a student symposium. Each student can present his/her research or ideas. The other students and the lecturers will act as a - friendly - public. There will be a prize for the best presentation

Keynote: The UberCloud HPC Experiment - Paving the way to HPC as a Service

There are several million of small and medium-size manufacturers around the world, most of them using workstations for their daily design and development work. However, there is often the need for more computing. Buying an expensive compute cluster is usually not an option, and renting computing power from the Cloud still comes with severe roadblocks, such as the complexity of the applications and their implementation itself, intellectual property and sensitive data, expensive data transfers, conservative software licensing, performance bottlenecks from virtualization, user-specific system requirements, and missing standards and lack of interoperability among different clouds.

On the other hand, the benefits of using remote computing resources are extremely attractive: no lengthy procurement and acquisition cycles; shifting some budget from capex to the more flexible opex; gaining business flexibility by getting additional resources on demand, at your finger tip; and scaling resource usage automatically up and down according to your actual needs.

The UberCloud Experiment has been designed to reduce many of the barriers mentioned above. By participating and moving the engineering application onto a remote computing resource, end-users can expect a long list of real benefits, such as: UberCloud is vendor neutral; no hunting for resources in a crowded Cloud market; professional match-making of end-users with suitable service providers; free, on-demand access to hardware, software, and expertise during the experiment; carefully tuned end-to-end, step-by-step process to accessing remote resources; learning from the best practices of other participants; no-obligation, risk free proof-of-concept: no money involved, no sensitive data transferred, no software license concerns, and the option to stay anonymous.

With these benefits, the experiment is leading the way to increasing business agility, competitiveness, and innovation, and participants are not getting left behind in the emerging world of Cloud Computing. Last but not least, all participants are encouraged to make use of the interactive UberCloud Exhibit, a directory of professional cloud services to the wider CAE, Life Sciences, and Big Data communities.

This presentation will focus on all the aforementioned topics in further detail and provide some real use cases from small and medium enterprises in digital manufacturing. Uber-Cloud experiment.