In the middle of the second year, the 4CaaSt Consortium fixed its regular General Assembly at Nokia Siemens Networks HQ in Budapest, which was the twin capital of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

The demos that will be shown at the European Commission are taking shape. If during the first review, each of these demos was a collection of several proofs of concept, now it’s our intention to provide bigger example blocks while we extend the features of the platform.

Additionally, we were preparing the participation of 4CaaSt at the International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds (C4BB4C), which will be held at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA2012).

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

The International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds (C4BB4C) (to be held at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications, ISPA2012) has just released the list of accepted papers.

It has been a difficult process due to the high quality of the received contributions, but finally, these are the papers that will be presented at the workshop:

1. 4CaaSt: Comprehensive management of Cloud services through a PaaS. Sergio García-Gómez, Francesco Lelli, Manuel Escriche-Vicente, Pablo Arozarena-Llopis, Yehia Yehia Taher, Vasilios Andrikopoulos, Steve Strauch, Christof Momm, Axel Spriestersbach, Miguel Jiménez-Gañán, Goulven Le Jeune, Michel Dao, Stephane P. Carrie, Joerg Niemoller, Dimitri Mazmanov, József Biro, Andrea Giesmann and Frederic Junker.
2. The Medianet Project: Integration of Multimedia Services for the next Generations Business oriented Internet. Jaime Garcia-Reinoso, Guillermo Ibañez, Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti and Ignacio Martin Llorente.
3. Towards Cloud-enabled Business Process Management based on Patterns, Rules and Multiple Models. Dana Petcu and Vlado Stankovski.
4. A Holistic Model for Making Cloud Migration Decision: A Consideration of Security, Architecture and Business Economics. Bjorn Johnson and Yanzhen Qu.
5. Incorporating Business Intelligence in Cloud Marketplaces. Anna Gatzioura, Andreas Menychtas, Vrettos Moulos and Theodora Varvarigou.
6. Revenue Models for Streaming Applications over Shared Clouds. Rafael Tolosana, Jose Angel Bañares, Congduc Pham and Omer Rana.
7. Issue in Automatic Combination of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Dinh Khoa Nguyen and Francesco Lelli.
8. Service Datastores in Cloud Governance. Adrian Copie, Teodor-Florin Fortis, Victor Ion Munteanu and Viorel Negru.
9. SDP as a Service (SDPaaS): A New Revenue Stream for Operators. Joaquín Salvachúa and Luis Galindo.
10. Aggregating Price Models for Composite Services in Cloud Service Marketplaces. Frederic Junker, Juergen Vogel and Katarina Stanoevska.

Hope to see you at Madrid!

This Workshop couldn’t be possible without the following projects: MEDIANET (Comunidad de Madrid S2009/TIC-1468), HPCcloud (MICINN TIN2009-07146) and 4CaaSt (Gr. Agree. 258862).

Last week I was invited by the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI) at Moscow to give a talk on cloud computing in the context of our collaboration within the Mars MetNet Mission.

An overview of the technology focusing on our efforts in European FP7 projects (4CaaSt among others) along with our latest achievements in the porting and optimization of critical applications were shown. Also, meetings were held in order to study the possibility of extending our collaboration to other space missions and not only to planet Mars.

Thanks to IKI I had the opportunity to visit the “Star City”, also known as “Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center”, where all astronauts traveling to the International Space Station perform their preparation.

So far, the publications produced by this research line are the following:

• J.L. Vázquez-Poletti, G. Barderas, I.M. Llorente and P. Romero: A Model for Efficient Onboard Actualization of an Instrumental Cyclogram for the Mars MetNet Mission on a Public Cloud Infrastructure. PARA2010: State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing, Reykjavík (Iceland), June 2010. Proceedings published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Volume 7133, pp. 33-42, 2012. Springer Verlag.
• Pilar Romero, Gonzalo Barderas, Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti and Ignacio M. Llorente: Temporal Areographic Patterns of Phobos Eclipses on Mars for the Metnet Precursor Mission. 8th European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2011 (EGU 2011), Vienna (Austria), April 2011. Proceedings published in Geophysical Research Abstracts. Volume 13, EGU2011-6470, 2011. Copernicus Publications.
• P. Romero, G. Barderas, J.L. Vázquez-Poletti and I.M. Llorente: Chronogram to detect Phobos Eclipses on Mars with the MetNet Precursor Lander. Planetary and Space Science, vol. 59, n. 13, 2011, pp. 1542-1550.
• A.-M. Harri, W. Schmidt, P. Romero, L. Vazquez, G. Barderas, O. Kemppinen, C. Aguirre, J.L. Vazquez-Poletti, I.M. Llorente and H. Haukka: Phobos eclipse detection on Mars, theory and practice. Technical Report, 2012 (to be published), Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Our latest work in the context of the Mars MetNet mission has been featured on Datanami, an on-line publication devoted to Big Data. This mission brings together Finland, Russia and Spain, aiming to deploy a meteorological network on the Mars surface consisting in several tens of probes.

This time, the challenge has to do with the data gathered  by NASA’s Viking landers 40 years ago. Its re-process will not only aid in the formulation of valid Martian weather models but also to improve the Cloud framework that will be used for the future data from the Mars MetNet probes.

You can read the full article here.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

The International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds (C4BB4C) will be held at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA2012).

Cloud Computing has acquired enough maturity to expand its field of application to business. Yet there are not only institutions which use this paradigm in their production line but there are also those which are offering services through the cloud.

This workshop intends to put together efforts done from service producers and consumers in order to make Cloud Computing provide an added value to the economy of any kind of institution. Technologies, policies and heuristics will be shared, not discarding those coming from other areas that would benefit Cloud Computing.

The Workshop intends also to focus on how services are delivered through the cloud as a popular strategic technology choice for businesses that provides a flexible, ubiquitous and consistent platform accessible from anywhere at any time.

The interface of software services and cloud computing provides a rich area for research and experience to give a unique insight into how cloud-based service can be achieved in practice. We encourage submissions of research papers on work in the area of Cloud Computing, Service Engineering, and especially welcome papers describing developments in cloud-enabled business process management and all related areas, such as deployment techniques, business models for cloud-based enterprises and experience reports from practitioners.

Extended version of selected papers will be included in a special issue of Scientific Computing: Practice and Experience.

This Workshop couldn’t be possible without the following projects: MEDIANET (Comunidad de Madrid S2009/TIC-1468), HPCcloud (MICINN TIN2009-07146) and 4CaaSt (Gr. Agree. 258862).

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

What’s new in the European research and development area?

The research and development community involved in distributed computing is searching for viable solutions that will increase the adoption of cloud computing. This is the case of the collaborative work done by multi-national teams in the context of the FP7 programme of the European Commission.

Students, researchers and developers working in the field of distributed computing will find in this book a snapshot of the on-going activities in research and development of cloud computing undertaken at the European level. These activities are organized by the latest hot topics of cloud computing research, which include services, management, automation and adoption.

This book is a result of the collaboration with Prof. Dana Petcu from West University of Timisoara (Romania) and among its chapters, the reader will find one devoted to 4CaaSt and another to StratusLab, projects where the DSA-Research group is actively participating.

Detailed Information

Title: European Research Activities in Cloud Computing

Editors: Dana Petcu and José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Date Of Publication: Jan 2012

Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3507-7

Isbn: 1-4438-3507-2

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Every academic year, many students decide to develop their Master Thesis projects at the DSA-Research group, attracted by the idea of working in cloud computing. This technology opens up a world of research possibilities and engenders a fast learning process, allowing the students to develop projects in a reasonable time.

HPC in the Cloud has featured the brilliant work done (or in progress) at the following projects:

• RSA@Cloud: Efficient Cryptoanalysis on the Cloud (2010-2011).
• CONSTRUCTOR: Cloud PaaS for Startups (2011-2012, ongoing).
• POPULOUS: Biodiversity on the Cloud (2011-2012, ongoing).

You can read the full article here.

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti