ICCLab, ZHAW is pleased to announce the successful start of the project SCALE-UP which is funded under program CUS 2013-2016 P-2 from swissuniversities. The project consortium includes 9 leading universities of Switzerland including EPFL, Universities of Bern, Basel, St. Gallen, USI, ZHAW, FHNW, FFHS, and FHSG. The kick-off meeting took place on August 28, 2015, at the project coordinator’s premises. The consortium is led by SWITCH.
After SWITCH, the major participant in the consortium is ICCLab. We are involved in three work packages, including one where ICCLab is the lead. In SCALE-UP, we will develop a Distributed Computing Platform (DCP) in the cloud that will allow researchers to provision and use their favorite data-processing framework (among a multitude of supported frameworks including Hadoop, Spark, Storm, etc.) on-demand over popular cloud frameworks such as OpenStack. For researchers who may not know the most suitable framework for their data processing needs, the DCP will provide a matching algorithm that will guide the researcher to the most suitable framework interactively. It is foreseen that ICCLab will leverage the capabilities of Hurtle (http://hurtle.it) while implementing the DCP in this project.
The figure below shows the high-level architecture envisioned in the entire SCALE-UP project.
As shown above, ICCLab will bring in their advance rating-charging-billing framework, Cyclops (http://icclab.github.io/cyclops/) into SCALE-UP. Cyclops will be integrated into existing cloud infrastructure offered by SWITCH. The goal here is to enable SWITCH and partner institutions (Swiss universities, research labs, etc.) implement most-suitable pricing and billing models for any tools and services they offer to the community. This will significantly advance the self-sustainability of various product and services being developed as part of this project. Towards this target, a marketplace is envisioned and Cyclops framework will be customized to support self-configuration of billing models for products and services launched via this marketplace.
Last but not the least, ICCLab will also develop an easy-to-use VM onboarding toolkit which would help researchers across all disciplines of science and technology move their local test VMs from Virtualbox environment into the SWITCH cloud.
The SCALE-UP project officially runs until end of Dec. 2017. The ICCLab initiatives involved in this project are Distributed Computing in the Cloud and Rating-Charging-Billing.