30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society
The 30th birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society (SI), held on Tue 25 June in Fribourg CH, concluded successfully with more then 200 participants who globally have attended the thematic workshops in the morning, the inaugural Meeting of the Swiss AIS Chapter and the plenary in the afternoon.
We post hereafter relevant topics on the Cloud Computing workshop, moderated by ZHAW ICCLAB, and the award ceremony.
Workshop: Cloud Computing in Switzerland
Cloud Computing is transforming the IT industry, and this concerns a high-tech country like Switzerland in particular. The resulting potentials and risks need to be well understood in order to be able to fully leverage the technical as well as economical advantages. This workshop provided an overview of current technological and economical trends with a particular focus on Switzerland and its Federal Cloud Computing strategy
8:45 – 9:00 Intro by Christof Marti (ZHAW)
Workshop introduction, goals and activities on Cloud Computing at ZHAW.
The Cloud Computing Special Interest Group (SIG), whose formation is coordinated by ZHAW ICCLAB, was introduced with its overall goals identified to stimulate the knowledge, implementation and development of Cloud Computing in Industry, Research, SMEs and Education. The Kick-Off meeting is foreseen in September (watch si-cc-sig or linkedin group for more details ). Further information were presented on the InIT Cloud Computing Lab (ICCLAB), Research Lab dedicated to Cloud Computing in the focus area of Service Engineering encompassing important research themes and cloud initiatives like: Automation, Interoperability, Dependability, SDN for Clouds, Monitoring, Rating, Charging, Billing and Future Internet platforms.
9:00-09:20 Peter Kunszt (SystemsX)
Cloud computing services for research – first steps and recommendations
The view of the scientific community on technological trends and the opportunities offered by Cloud Computing infrastructures. Interesting start of the workshop by the Project leader of SyBIT (SystemsX.ch Biology IT: SyBIT) with overview of possible cloud services for science and education, recommendation concerning commercial vs. selfmade clouds and possible pricing & billing models for science .
9:20-09:40 Markus Brunner (Swisscom)
Cloud/SDN in Service Provider Networks
Markus illustrated “why a new network architecture” with feature comparision of aging network technology (static) and current trend (dynamic) on global needs like cost effectiveness, agility and service oriented. The proposal was to look at new infrastructures based on SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualisation). NFV is concerned with porting network or telecommunications applications, that today typically run on dedicated and specialized hardware platforms, to virtualized Cloud platforms. Some basic architectures were discussed and interplay of NFV-SDN. The presentation concluded with analysis of challenges for Cloud technologies today for communication oriented applications like: Real-time, Security, Predictable performance, Fault Management in Virtualized Systems and fixed / mobile differences.
9:40-10:00 Sergio Maffioletti (University of Zurich)
A roadmap for an Academic Cloud
“The view of the scientific community on how cloud technology could be used as a foundation for building a national research support infrastructure”. Interesting and innovative presentation made by Sergio starting from the “why and what’s wrong” analysis through the initiatives in places (new platforms, cloud utilisation and long tem competitiveness objectives). The presentation also made an overview of how this is implemented with National Research Infrastructure program (the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud project) and innovative management systems (a mechanism to collect community requirements and implementing technical services and solution ). The presentation concluded on the objectives and targets like: inter-operate, intra/inter access to institutional infrastructure, cloud enabled, research clustering and national computational resources.
10:00-10:20 Michèal Higgins (CloudSigma) – remote
CloudSigma and the Challenges of Big Science in the Cloud
Switzerland based CloudSigma is a pure-cloud IaaS service provider, offering highly-available flexible enterprise-class cloud servers in Europe and the U.S. It offers innovative services like all SSD storage, high performance solutions and firewall/VPN services. Helping building the a federated cloud platform (Helix Nebula) that addresses the needs of big science, CloudSigma sees the biggest challenges and values to have huge data-sets available close to the computing instances. As a conclusion CloudSigmas offers the Science community to store common big data sets for free close to their compute instances reducing the cost and time to transfer the data.
10:20-10:40 Muharem Hrnjadovic (RackSpace)
An overview of key capabilities of cloud based infrastructures like OpenStack and challenging scenarios were presented during this session.
10:40-10:45 All
Q&A session
Swiss Informatics Competition 2013
Aside from speakers and panel discussions, captivating student projects (Bachelors & Masters in Computer Science), from Universities and High Schools Specialty, have been introduced to illustrate the diversity of computing technologies. Selected projects by team of experts have been also awarded. The details on the student projects are available here.
Some photos taken from the cloud computing workshop, the plenary and ending awards:
