Tag: presentation

Impressions from the UCC 2015 Conference, and Call for 2016

by Josef Spillner

On four days last year, from December 7 to 10 in 2015, two representatives of ICCLab and SPLab participated actively at the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2015) which attracted about 150 academic and industrial researchers to the island of Cyprus where the University of Cyprus hosted the event close to the city of Limassol. The high density of technical talks, tutorials and poster presentations has conveyed solutions to the current and even near future issues in cloud computing.

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30th Birthday of the Swiss Informatics Society

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:

Capture33 IMG_20130625_174341_stitch IMG_20130625_174455 IMG_20130625_174733 IMG_20130625_180000Foto 5Foto 3

Foto 2 Foto 1

ICCLab @ Swiss Academic Cloud Computing Experience

We presented at the Swiss Academic Cloud Computing Experience conference. Below are the slides as presented (or you can grab the PDF here).

SDN – OpenFlow Presentation to the IT-MAS students

Last Friday Philipp from the ICCLab gave a presentation about SDN and OpenFlow to ZHAW master students. The big difference is that the average age of the students is higher and all of them are working for many years in the field of IT. Furthermore, most of them have a leading position in their daily work. The content of the presentation is not that detailed an covers basically the two whitepapers from the ONF and openflowhub.org about SDN and OpenFlow. We also talked about the available products in the field of OpenFlow controllers and why SDN in general is such an important thing for the datacenter providers, ISP’s or Carrier Ethernet.

The discussion we had after the presentation contained also some critical voices that addressed problems like:

  • OK, we are vendor independent and have full control over the network but this means also, that we are responsible for it.
  • Is it not easier for SME’s to have a ready made network component from e.g. Cisco instead of programming the logic by themselves?
  • The centralized network controller looks like a single point of failure and without the network, most business applications will not work.
  • Will the programmed network logic inside the controller not bee a huge bunch of code that was before distributed and small on every device?

Of course, we can answer the questions and solve these problems with the SDN paradigm. But the conclusion for us is that we can only get these people on board if we not only talk about SDN concepts but present demonstrators.  What we need at this point are:

  • Concrete working pieces of code and open working network logic that is tested and maintained as e.g. spanning-tree modules.
  • Testbeds and use-cases for implementation, migration and operation.
  • Fully functional and easy to implement network controller modules.

Such people as the master students are needed because they are and/or will be the decision makers. It is also not enough to say: “Look, Google uses it in their wide area network.”

Integration and migration of our existing network infrastructure is exactly what we are planning to do at the ICCLab. I hope that more people will share their knowledge and experience about a successful migration of their classical network to a SDN based infrastructure.

Call for Participation : Cloud-based Service Platforms for the Future Internet

We would like to announce the 7th Workshop (Fachgespraech) on Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms, “Cloud-based Service Platforms for the Future Internet”, of the GI/ITG specialist group on Communications and Distributed Systems “Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme (KuVS)”.

29th of November 2012, Technopark Building, Jägerstrasse 2, CH-8406 Winterthur, Room LT AE130, Winterthur, Switzerland

Registration: info.init@zhaw.ch

Agenda

830-900 – Welcome

900-1040

  • Robert Jenkins “Delivering Reliable Performance from a Public IaaS Cloud” (slides), CTO CloudSigma
  • Jyrki Huusko, Research Group Leader, VTT
  • Philip Healy, Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4)
  • Matthias Keller, Research Associate, Uni Paderborn
  • Sam Johnston, Director Cloud Innovation at Equinix

1040-1100 – Break

1100-1240

  • Jaime Martin Losa “eProsima RPC over DDS: Integrating Services in the Cloud” (slides), CTO, eProsima
  • Florian Antonescu, Research Associate, SAP/Uni Bern
  • Jean-Pierre Laisne, Open Source Manager, CompatibleOne, Bull
  • Guilherme Machado, Research Associate, Uni Zurich
  • Theo Lynn, Director,Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4)

1240-1400 – Lunch

1400-1540

  • Dominic Greenwood, COO, Whitestein Technologies
  • Julius Mueller, Research Associate, Fraunhofer FOKUS
  • Brian Trammell, Research Associate, ETH Zürich
  • Riccardo Murri, Research Associate, Uni Zurich
  • Sean Murphy, Entrepreneur/Senior Researcher, University College Dublin

1540-1600 – Break

1600-1740

  • Christof Marti, Assoc Prof, ICCLab/ZHAW
  • Alessandra Scicchitano, System Engineer, SWITCH
  • Bernhard Tellenbach, Assoc Prof, ZHAW
  • Oliver Friedrich, Senior Researcher, Deutsche Telecom
  • Thijs Metsch, Senior Researcher, INTEL

18.00 – Wrap Up (TMB, ICCLab)

How to get there

The event will take place at the:
Technopark Building, Jägerstrasse 2, CH-8406 Winterthur, Room LT AE130. www.tpw.ch

Transportation:
By rail: From Zurich central train station: take a regular train (IC,IR) from Zurich to Winterthur central station or S12 to Winterthur central station or S7 to Winterthur central station

By airplane: take a regular train from Zurich-Airport to Winterthur central station or S12 to Winterthur central station or S16 to Winterthur central station

Trains take about 25min from Zurich central station to Winterthur central station. Public transport schedules are available at: http://www.zvv.ch/en/ A ticket should be around ~25CHF (one-way)

At Winterthur central station take a walk to the campus, walking distance approx. 12 minutes.

Hotels in Winterthur:
Zhaw has special rate conditions with the following city centre located hotels. Please ask in any case for zhaw – pricing when making reservations Hotel Wartmann / Tel 0041 52 260 07 07 http://www.wartmann.ch/en/home.asp
Hotel Loge / Tel 0041 52 268 12 00 http://www.hotelloge.ch/hotel.html
Hotel Krone (Sorell Hotels) http://www.kronewinterthur.ch Hotel Banana City / Tel 0041 52 268 16 16 http://www.bananacity.ch/en Other accommodations and information about Winterthur:
http://www.winterthur-tourismus.ch/en/page.cfm/Unterkunft
Another option: Stay in Zurich & commute

Hotels in Zurich
http://www.zuerich.com/en/Visitor/accommodation.html

Call for Presentations

As the formerly divided Telco and IT industry continues to converge in the “Future Internet”, demand for “Cloud-based Service Platforms” is sharply rising. This important topic is thus made subject of this workshop and presentations are welcome in any domain related to cloud-based service delivery, that is service delivery and cloud hosting technology that adopts, exploits, consumes, or provides any kind of cloud attributes.

It is the objective of this series of workshops to support intense discussions among researchers from industry and academia in this challenging area gluing together applications and different network types.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • On-demand, elastic, and metered computing and service delivery
  • Software-as-a-service, Platform-as-service, Storage as a service, Data-as-a-Service, Process-as-a-Service
  • Cloud computing programming and application development
  • Trust, privacy, and security for clouds and cloud-based service platforms
  • Cloud and service platform performance (QoS, power-efficiency, load balancing, etc)
  • Cloud and services SLAs, business models and pricing policies, subscription model
  • Enabling virtualisation and hosting technologies, novel data centers and nano-centers concepts and technologies
  • Orchestration and composition of services and applications hosted in data centres and clouds
  • Pre-packaged applications and services hosted in the cloud, licensing and support policies
  • Novel cloud-based applications and services
  • Mobile cloud computing
  • Test-beds, pilots, and field trials, standardisation and regulatory issues

Important Dates and Submission Information:

  • October 23, 2012:  Deadline for Abstracts (2-3 pages max)
  • November 6, 2012: Final Program
  • November 29 2012: Workshop at the ICCLab at ZHAW in Winterthur
  • September 20, 2012: Register via email
  • Paper submission and registration: info [at] kuvs-ngsdp [dot] org
  • Language is English

Paper submission (Language is English) and registration: info@kuvs-ngsdp.org

Local (Swiss) Chairs

T. M. Bohnert and Prof G. Baudinot (ZHAW), Prof Dr T. Braun (Uni Bern), Prof Dr B. Stiller (Uni Zurich), Prof Dr B. Plattner (ETH)

Steering Board

Dr. Heinrich Arnold, Deutsche Telekom AG – Laboratories, Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Kellerer, DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Germany, Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, Dr. Karsten Schröder, Telefonica o2 Germany, Prof. Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University, USA, Dr. Steffen Weichselbaum, Vodafone D2 GmbH, Germany

Sponsors

From Bare Metal to Cloud

This is the presentation that was presented at the [EGI Technical Forum 2012 in Prague](http://tf2012.egi.eu/).

If you like, [download the slides as pdf](http://blog.zhaw.ch/icclab/files/2012/09/From-Bare-Metal-to-Cloud.pdf).

There is also a youtube video showing the various stages of bring bare metal machines to a state such that they have OpenStack installed and operational.

For those in attendance or those that are interested in how all of this is done, all information, HOWTOs, code, virtual machine images are available from this site.

The talk had an excellent attendance and there is great interest in using OpenStack within the EGI FedCloud environment, especially one where the installation is automated as with our work.

ICCLab EGI TF Audience

 

Video: ICCLab Presenting on Open Standards, OpenStack @ /ch/open

The ICCLab team presented gave a live demo of our [OpenStack cluster](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2012/06/whats-powering-the-icclab/) at the /ch/open [Open Cloud Day](http://www.ch-open.ch/index.php?id=1034). It was an excellent day with many view points from governmental all the way down to Infrastructure as a Service and automation.

The presentation given in this video and more details of the talk can be [found in this article](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2012/06/icclab-presented-at-open-ch/).

ICCLab to Present “From Bare-Metal to Cloud” at EGI Technical Forum 2012

ICCLabs and GWDG will present on the topic of “From Bare-Metal to Cloud” at EGI Technical Forum 2012 in Prague.

The ICCLab and GWDG had a shared, common problem, namely how to deploy infrastructural service technology (e.g. OpenStack, CloudStack etc.) with the least amount of user interaction (i.e. automated) during the deployment process, across a large number of servers. The solution to be presented allows for the easy deployment of operating systems on to bare-metal (physical servers) and the deployment and management of specified software packages upon those provisioned bare-metal systems. To accomplish the combination of Foreman and Puppet was chosen. For the work, it was assumed that the network architecture, partitioning etc. is already determined.

This presentation will detail what measures have been taken to automate the provisioning of OpenStack clusters at the two research labs. The presentation will describe the technology stack, discuss the individual technologies used and share the information with others. It will conclude with a demonstration of provisioning a multi-cluster OpenStack deployment upon virgin bare metal servers.

ICCLab Presented at /ch/open

The ICCLab team presented gave a live demo of [our OpenStack cluster](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2012/06/whats-powering-the-icclab/) at the [/ch/open Open Cloud Day](http://www.ch-open.ch/index.php?id=1034). It was an excellent day with many view points from governmental all the way down to Infrastructure as a Service and automation. We also announced the [Swiss OpenStack User Group](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/openstack-user-group/) and we’re looking forward to the inaugural event.

This event is particularly important given that Cloud Computing is as ever becoming more and more important. To get the full power of clouds, in the view of /ch/open and the ICCLab, these clouds should be open according to the  open cloud initiative principles. The goal is to foster open clouds and interoperability of clouds. Especially taking into account the requirements of public administrations.

**Title:** The OpenStack Cloud Computing Framework and Eco-System

**Authors:** [Thomas M. Bohnert](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/team/thomas-michael-bohnert/), [Andy Edmonds](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/team/andy-edmonds/), [Christof Marti](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/team/christof-marti/), [Fabrice Mannhart](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/team/fabrice-manhart/)

**[Presentation link](http://blog.zhaw.ch/icclab/files/2012/06/2012-06-OpenStack-CloudDays-Bern-fin-fin.pdf)**

**Abstract:**

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

The InIT Cloud Computing Lab (ICCLab) of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences is researching the full cloud computing stack. Much of this work happens in the context of the OpenStack framework and the ICCLab is official coordinator of the “OpenStack Community Switzerland”.

In this talk we’ll present evolution, objectives, scope, and status of the the OpenStack project. Attendees will be briefed from an technological and eco-system perspective, thus learning what defines Cloud Computing, how OpenStack implements Cloud Computing, and how to engage with the OpenStack community. The talk will close with a short overview of research activities and services provided by the ICClab.