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Nefeli: Hint-based Execution of Workloads in Clouds
A new paper about D4Science work, prepaired by Konstantinos Tsakalozos, Mema Roussopoulos, Vangelis Floros and Alex Deliswork has been accepted for publication on the ICDCS 2010: The 30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.Abstract: Virtualization of computer systems has made feasible the provision of entire distributed infrastructures in the form of services. Such services do not expose the internal operational and physical characteristics of the underlying machinery to either users or applications. In this way, infrastructures including computers in data-centers, clusters of workstations, and networks of machines are shrouded in “clouds”. Mainly through the deployment of virtual machines, such networks of computing nodes become cloud-computing environments. In this paper, we propose Nefeli, a virtual infrastructure gateway that is capable of effectively handling diverse workloads of jobs in cloud environments. By and large, users and their workloads remain agnostic to the internal features of clouds at all times. Exploiting execution patterns as well as logistical constraints, users provide Nefeli with hints for the handling of their jobs. Hints provide no hard requirements for application deployment in terms of pairing virtual-machines to speci?c physical cloud elements.
Nefeli helps avoid bottlenecks within the cloud through the realization of viable virtual machine deployment mappings. As the types of jobs change over time, deployment mappings must follow suit.
Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Tue, 02/03/2010 - 10:02.
D4Science invited to ECRI2010
D4Science II has been invited to participate in the the forthcoming 6th European Conference on Research Infrastructures (ECRI2010), as a recognition of its involvement in research infrastructures. The conference, co-organized by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Commission, will take place in Barcelona, on 23 and 24 March 2010, under the auspices of the Spanish EU Council Presidency.
The objectives of the conference are to promote discussions on the European strategy for research infrastructures (RIs) and on the decision making process to enable the implementation of the ESFRI roadmap. Management and financial issues, as well as the governance structures of these RIs within the ERA, will be addressed. There will also be a specific session devoted to e-infrastructure for science that will deal with key challenges for the future.
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Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Mon, 01/03/2010 - 10:40.
New applications and new image for gcube
gCube has evolved beyond its original design intentions. It was born to extend the grid spirit of resource sharing to service-oriented applications. Its name and logo were conceived to express this key characteristic: sharing. Sharing of computing power, sharing of data, and sharing of application services. Three times sharing.
gCube is now a mature system that allows distributed and dynamic communities (Virtual Organisations) to collaborate and share resources simply and efficiently within a common e-Infrastructure. It does so by creating on-demand Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Starting from a set of hardware, data and service resources, gCube can dynamically setup and manage a VRE for both long and short term research projects. Within the VRE, different types of information can be processed and new knowledge and services can be shared.
Moreover, gCube has grown to include a number of key applications for its users. Now, the management of large statistical data can be easily outsourced to the e-Infrastructure; the prediction of the impact of climate change on marine species distribution can be done quickly by biologists and marine scientists; the generation of live report integrating different media objects automatically generated on-demand has become a reality, etc.
Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Thu, 04/02/2010 - 09:47.
D4SCIENCE WORLD USER MEETING - ON ERCIM MAGAZINE
The D4Science World User Meeting has been published on ERCIM News nr. 80, January 2010, Special theme: Digital Preservation.
To read the article, by Donatella Castelli, Marc Taconet and Virginie Viollier, please visit: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en80/events/d4science-world-user-meeting
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Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Wed, 27/01/2010 - 11:03.
gCube and the Humanities: the gMan Experiments
D4Science serves mainly scientific communities but gCube, the service-based system that operates the infrastructure, is unbiased in supporting collaborations across diverse research disciplines. For its emphasis on application-level requirements of information and knowledge management, gCube is in fact ideally suited to support researchers in the Humanities. At the same time, the notion of Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the Humanities is commanding increasing attention in the UK, thanks to successful initiatives in Archeology (e.g. the Silchester Town Life VRE, the Virtual Environments for Research in Archeology, Ancient History (e.g. A VRE for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts, the Linking and Querying Ancient Texts (LaQuAT) project, and the Digital Humanities at large (e.g. textVRE). In this respect, the European initiative DARIAH indicates that the Humanities are no different from the Sciences in requiring general-purpose, scalable, and cost-effective solutions to VRE definition and management, particularly those built on the controlled and dynamic sharing of infrastructural resources (hardware, software, and data).
The Centre for e-Research at Kings' College, London (CeRch) believes that the integration and transparencies offered by gCube may be part of the vision for Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities, and it has recently liaised with the University of Strathclyde to carry out a set of preliminary experiments based on gCube. The experiments will be carried out in the context of the gMan, a six-month project recently funded under the VRE Rapid Innovation Programme of the Joint Information Systems Committee UK (JISC). Th project will focus on use cases related to the organisation of the information for research and on ‘active reading’ processes supported by advanced search, browse, and annotations services. A preliminary VRE for the experiments has been created in the Ecosystem VO of the D4Science Infrastructure and activities are underway to integrate a selection of independent yet semantically related data sources, such as: the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis (HGV) der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Aegyptens, a database of metadata records for some 55,000 Greek papyri, mostly from Roman Egypt and its environs; Projet[sic] Volterra,a database of Roman legal texts, and associated metadata, from various sources (epigraphic, papyrological, or literary); and the Inscription of Aphrodisias, a corpus of about 2,000 ancient Greek inscriptions from the Roman city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor.
Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Fri, 22/01/2010 - 17:03.
D4Science World User Meeting Survey Results
Please find attached the results of the D4Science World User Meeting survey.
The survey has been completed by 31 persons that take out more than 37% of all the participants.
The questionnaire analysis proves that the general assessment of the meeting among the respondents shows positive results.The importance and necessities of holding this meeting is highlighted by the fact that almost 94% of the participants had obtained information which they were not previously aware of. For the meetings held in the future a greater emphasis should be placed on interaction and more room for discussion should be provided. According to the feedbacks the D4Science meeting obtained its objectives.
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Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Thu, 21/01/2010 - 11:29.
Season's Greetings from the D4Science and D4Science-II projects!
Submitted by D4Science_staff on Fri, 18/12/2009 - 18:07.
REMINDER ::::::: D4Science World User Meeting - Your feedback is appreciated!
Kind reminder to all D4Science World User Meeting participants to send us your feedback about this event by filling a short questionnaire at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=5b7rXWfGqfej_2b7He96yAag_3d_3d.
The survey will be closed next Wednesday, 16 December 2009.
Your impressions and proposals for future editions and areas of improvement are highly appreciated.
Thank you for taking part in the D4Science World User Meeting!
Submitted by D4Science_staff on Fri, 11/12/2009 - 16:48.
