Month: August 2014 (page 1 of 2)

ICCLab summer retreat in the Black Forest

From August 20th to August 22nd, ICCLab went to a summer retreat in Grafenhausen, into the Black Forest, Germany.

The objective of the retreat was to define the current status of our research Themes and Initiatives and expose the planned work for the year to come. With so many new team members that joined us in the last months and the impressive growth rate of our lab, it was necessary to define ways to keep our work organized and efficient and respect the principles of our approach to research. Besides the hard work… well… certainly when twenty young people spend three days and *two nights* together, a great deal of fun is also to be expected!

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Srikanta Patanjali

srikantaSrikanta Patanjali is currently pursuing Master’s in Software Engineering at Hof University of Applied Science in Germany. Previously he completed his Bachelor’s (NMIT) and Post Graduate Diploma (IIIT-B) studies in Bangalore, India. He then worked for two years at IBM India and developed order capturing applications and tools for telecom industry using Java Webservices.

Srikanta has been an active IEEE volunteer for the past 7 years. He enjoys trekking, loves to explore places, meet people from different cultures & occasionally blogs.

At the ICCLab as an IAESTE trainee, Srikanta will be working along with Piyush on the topic of Rating, Charging & Billing for cloud.

Vojtech Cima

Vojtech joined the ICC lab through the IAESTE trainee programme.

He’s completed his  Masters study programme at the department of Computer science of the Technical University in Ostrava in Czech Republic. During his studies, he spent one year at Saimaa University of Applied Sciences in Finland participating in a double degree study program. His academic activities are mainly focused on computer vision and image segmentation.

Outside his studies, he has had diverse work experiences. He worked as a Web app Developer for Outotec Company during his stay in Finland. Afterwards he joined Verizon as a part-time Network Engineer for the period of time before he came to Switzerland.

ICCLab provides Vojtech a great opportunity to take  part in the fast moving  cloud computing industry and extend his horizons in this exciting field in a very international environment of young (and not so young!) technically talented people.

During his 10-month internship in ZHAW ICCLab he explored and compared different approaches for live virtual machine migration in an Openstack context. This work was done within the ICCLab’s energy aware cloud load management initiative.

Currently, he works on the ACeN KTI project focusing on network function virtualisation (NFV) in collaboration with two industry partners – Exoscale and Citrix.

Vojtech’s first day leads him to believe that besides the technical skills he will learn, he will also get unforgettable memories with new co-workers and friends.

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ICCLab @ Nagios World Conference 2014: Nagios Ceilometer Integration

The ICCLab will be present at the Nagios World Conference 2014, which takes place Oct. 13th-16th in St. Paul, MN, USA. Konstantin Benz will speak about the employment of Nagios as a tool to monitor OpenStack clouds. While Nagios is the de facto Open Source standard for monitoring IT systems, the OpenStack community uses Ceilometer to monitor VMs and other resources in the cloud. The main reason for that is the special requirements of rating, charging and billing in the cloud: VM usage must be stored persistently, even when a VM has been shut down and deleted by an end user. In standard monitoring contexts it is not necessary to store data of resources which are not present in the system anymore. Ceilometer does a quite good job in monitoring virtual resources. On the other hand a system administrator might not be interested only in monitoring the virtual resources which are provided by OpenStack: monitoring OpenStack itself is also a major task in administration of an OpenStack cloud. While Ceilometer is mainly used for monitoring resources provided by OpenStack, it does not monitor availability and performance of servers that deploy OpenStack services. Nagios is the industry standard for monitoring physical IT infrastructures. Therefore we will discuss the question on how to integrate Nagios with Ceilometer on the Nagios World Conference.

If you want to know more about the conference, follow this link:
Nagios World Conference

Collecting energy consumption data using Kwapi in Openstack

In some of our projects we need to understand the energy consumption of our servers in an Openstack cluster. The first step in this process was to collect energy consumption data from our IBM servers; we stored this in Ceilometer for further study. In this blog post we will cover how we do this.

First, Kwapi 101.

Kwapi is a part of the openstack ecosystem (perhaps a little peripheral) which is focused on collecting energy data. It has pretty good integration with Ceilometer which enables the energy data to be stored there.

Kwapi is architected in such a way that individual drivers listen to a specific wattmeter – a wattmeter can be a physical energy meter with a wifi interface or connected to ipmi, i.e. any kind of device that measures energy consumption. The drivers then pass the information on to plug-ins. These are the API, the forwarder and the RRD plugin which is the visualization plugin that provides a web interface with power consumption graphs.

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Gabriel Ankeshian

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Gabriel is an assistant at ZHAW InIT Cloud Computing Lab who started as an intern in August 2014. He finished his high school education to become a developer. He now started studying in the field of computer science and works part time at the lab.

Gabriel is working on the Cloud Storage initiative with Vincenzo Pii.

Yannic Itten

Yannic Itten is doing a one year internship in the cloud computing lab as part of his training to become an application developer. He is currently a student at an IT highschool called “Informatikmittelschule” in Frauenfeld, Switzerland. During his stay, he is working on the software defined networking project of the ICCLab.

ICCLab News – July 2014 Issue no.2

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ZHAW Service Engineering ICCLab periodically sends Newsletters with short information about latest activities of the lab and relevant events. This is the newsletter for July 2014.

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Glorjan Çadri

GlorjanGlorjan Çadri is an intern at ZHAW InIT Cloud Computing Lab who found ICCLab through IAESTE program for exchange of students for technical experience.

He is a student from Polytechnic University of Tirana, studying Computer Engineering in Faculty of Information Technologies.

During his six months internship, he will be working on Software Defined Networking, particularly in Software Development Kit for Software Defined Networking project.

Real-time data processing with Storm

Real-time data processing

Many use cases across various domains require real-time data processing for faster decision making: credit card fraud analytics, network fault prediction from sensor data, security threat prediction, etc. Data Stream Processing or stream computing is the new computing paradigm for processing streaming data in real-time without storing them in secondary storage. Twitter’s Storm project is a distributed real-time computation system, designed to be scalable, fault tolerant and programming language agnostic. Although it’s at an early stage (currently in incubation at The Apache Software Foundation), Storm is used by well-known companies with significant volumes of streaming data, such as The Weather Channel, Spotify, Twitter, and Rocket Fuel.

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