Researchers from a collaboration of six European organisations have attracted funding worth €2.3million to develop a new Internet-based software project called StratusLab. The two year project, headed up by Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis from CNRS, was launched in Paris today (14th June 2010). It aims to enhance distributed computing infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), that allow research and higher education institutes from around the world to pool computing resources.

Funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the two year project aims to successfully integrate ‘cloud computing’ technologies into ‘grid’ infrastructures. Grids link computers and data that are scattered across the globe to work together for common goals, whilst cloud computing makes software platforms or virtual servers available as a service over the Internet, usually on a commercial basis, and provides a way for organisations to access computing capacity without investing directly in new infrastructure. Behind cloud services are data centres that typically house large numbers of processors and vast data storage systems. Linking grid and cloud technologies will result in major benefits for European academic research and is part of the European Commission strategy to develop European computing infrastructures.

StratusLab will integrate, distribute and maintain a sustainable open-source cloud distribution to bring cloud to existing and new grid sites. The StratusLab toolkit will be composed of existing cutting edge open source software, and the innovative service and cloud management technologies developed in the project. The StratusLab toolkit will integrate OpenNebula, the leading open-source toolkit for cloud computing,

Speaking about the project, Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis said: “Computer grids are used by thousands of researchers in many scientific fields. For example, the data from the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator situated at CERN in Switzerland, are distributed via an international grid infrastructure to be processed at institutes around Europe and the world. The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands. Later it will allow organisations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.”

The StratusLab project will bring several benefits to the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem including simplified management, added flexibility, increased maintainability, quality, energy efficiency and resilience of computing sites. It will benefit a wide variety of users from scientists, who can use the systems to run scientific analyses, to system administrators and hardware technicians, who are responsible for running grid services and maintaining the hardware and infrastructure at various resource centres.

The StratusLab project brings together six organisations, all key players with recognised leadership, proven expertise, experience and skills in grid and cloud computing. This collaboration presents a balanced combination of academic, research and industrial institutes with complementary capabilities. The participating organisations include the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; the DSA-Research Group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain; the Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., Greece; SixSq Sárl, Switzerland; Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo, Spain, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

About the StratusLab Project

The StratusLab project consists of numerous collaborators from six European research institutions. A website can be accessed via the following address: www.stratuslab.eu. The project is partially funded by the European Commission through the Grant Agreement RI-261552.

About OpenNebula

OpenNebula is the most advanced open-source toolkit for building private, public and hybrid clouds, offering unique features for cloud management and providing the integration capabilities that many enterprise IT shops need for internal cloud. OpenNebula is the result of many years of research and development in efficient and scalable management of virtual machines on large-scale distributed infrastructures. The technology has been designed to address the requirements of business use cases from leading companies in the context of flagship international projects in cloud computing. For more info: http://www.OpenNebula.org

About European Union Framework Programme 7

The Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) bundles all research-related EU initiatives together under a common roof playing a crucial role in reaching the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment. The framework programme runs a number of programmes under the headings Cooperation, Ideas, People and Capacities. All specific programmes work together to promote and encourage the creation of European poles of scientific excellence. More information on FP7 can be obtained from http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html.

A couple of months ago the OpenNebula open-source project established the OpenNebula Ecosystem in order to promote the different tools, extensions and plug-ins that are available to complement OpenNebula from a wide variety of projects, companies, and research centers. These ecosystem components enhance the functionality provided by the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit or enable its integration with existing products, services and management tools in the virtualization, cloud and data center ecosystems. Recently two new components have been added to the catalog:

• Deltacloud Driver: Deltacloud RedHat’s project defines a web service API for interacting with cloud service providers and resources in those clouds in a unified manner.
• Libcloud Driver: Libcloud is a pure python client library for interacting with many of the popular cloud server providers.

A team led by Sebastien Goasguen in Clemson University has also contributed a tool for transferring files to Unix machines on a cluster, this Python tool is able to transfer a 10GB file to 450 hosts in less than one hour. scp-wave tool is of great help when deploying virtualized services on very large-scale infrastructures.

In few weeks the project will announce new tools in the ecosystem, like the support for new cloud APIs (now OpenNebula already supports OCCI and EC2-Query).

Ignacio M. Llorente

Next year, the Mars MetNet Mission which is formed by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), Lavochkin Association (LA), the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI) and Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA), will launch its first probe to planet Mars. The objective of this mission is to establish the next generation observation network for studying its atmosphere, representing this first probe the first “Martian weather station” of many that will come.

Logo of Mars MetNet Mission

One of the aspects to take into account during the probe operational lifetime are the effects of Phobos‘ eclipses. Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, orbits at approximately 9,000 Km from Mars, being its period 7 hours and 39.2 minutes. The prediction of each eclipse is important for the onboard instruments and it evidently depends on the landing coordinates, which won’t be exactly known until few hours before.

For this reason, an application has been developed at the Faculty of Mathematics of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which traces Phobos’ trajectories given the coordinates and the required time.  Execution times were too high to consider traditional computing solutions, but the tracing period could be divided at will. This way, the problem could be parameterized and the resulting distributed application, executed on the Cloud.

Answering the question of which and how many resources must be instantiated on a public cloud to obtain a compromise between the time and cost, a valid model for executing this application on Amazon EC2 has been formulated. Depending on the required simulation time, the model returns the best task tracing period along with the number and type of virtual machines.

Phobos' eclipse caught by NASA's rover Opportunity

As a result of this collaboration, the present work has been accepted for its presentation under the title “A Model for Efficient Onboard Actualization of an Instrumental Cyclogram for the Mars MetNet Mission on a Public Cloud Infrastructure” at the PARA2010: State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing Conference, that will be held in Reykavík (Iceland) on June 6-9, 2010.

From similar stories, it seems that Cloud Computing is aiming beyond the clouds.

This year OpenNebula has been selected as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization. GSoC is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. During the last six years GSoC has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors  from nearly 100 countries worldwide. For more information about the program take a look to the GSoC FAQ.

We are very excited about this great opportunity to work with very talented and self-motivated students. During the summer the students will be part of our community, and will have the opportunity to learn the basics of virtualization, cloud computing and OpenNebula.

If you are a student, and would be interested in participating in GSoC with OpenNebula as your mentoring organization, please take a look at our GSoC Ideas page.  This page lists projects that OpenNebula has proposed for GSoC, but it is not a closed list.  If you have an idea for a cool project that uses or extends OpenNebula, please contact one of the OpenNebula  GSoC mentors.  Also, if you are teaching distributed/cloud computing or related courses please share this information with your students.

Once you are ready to submit an application, remember that you must do so before April 9th through the GSoC webapp. So come and join us this summer to improve the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit!

Ruben S. Montero