SIENA

Cloudscape IV Position Papers

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:34:00 GMT

SIENA is the first initiative to bring to the same table relevant standards organisations to support a coordinated development and implementation in the context of the SIENA Roadmap. The Position Papers collected here for Cloudscape IV (23-24 February 2012) provide related insights into a fast-evolving landscape. A wide variety of views and perspectives are given. The first section focuses mainly on the evolution of e-infrastructures in response to both new user requirements and the arrival of new technologies as a sign of vigorous health alongside the broader European landscape. A sample of current trends and challenges for cloud-based public services in Europe is provided together with international perspectives. The last sections are dedicated to challenges surrounding trust, security, legal and data issues and examples of current standardisation work aimed at responding to community-driven challenges.

Cloud computing is moving at an incredibly fast pace. We use cloud services every day for internet searches, mobile applications, photo sharing, messaging, and social networking. The internet of things is expected to drive many new applications in the cloud. In the scientific arena, cloud computing is gaining momentum for data intensive problems because they have the closely coupled structure well supported in clouds. Cloud computing is also seen as a great potential for mitigating financial and other difficulties of public administrations in Europe. It promises not only the optimised usage of IT resources, but also implies a great variety of collaboration and consolidation options.

International standardisation efforts are expected to have a huge impact on cloud computing. However, several major governmental cloud computing programmes are being pursued in the absence of an adequate set of agreed and accepted open standards that could guarantee security, portability and interoperability of cloud services. It is imperative that the current standardisation dialogue is intensified and extended to involve all stakeholders spanning standards organizations, cloud cooperative working groups, open-source and commercial providers, global and regional public sector institutions. Only a continuous open dialogue on priority actions will help us unleash the full potential of cloud computing arena for the collective common good, globally.

SIENA Roadmap on Distributed Computing Infrastructure for e-Science and Beyond in Europe

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:27:00 GMT

This roadmap assesses the situation, identifies issues, and makes recommendations regarding the adoption and evolution of open standards-based interoperable grid and cloud computing infrastructure (e-infrastructure) to support research in Europe. The vision for such a European e-infrastructure is to empower productivity of research communities through ubiquitous, trusted, and easy trans-national access to services for data, computation, communication and collaborative work. Some considerations in this roadmap apply also to computing in industry and the public sector.

SIENA is funded European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7). The goal of SIENA, Standards and Interoperability for eInfrastructure implemeNtation initiAtive, is to accelerate and coordinate the adoption and evolution of interoperable distributed computing infrastructures through engagement with industry, standards development organisations (SDOs) and major stakeholders to forge community agreements on best practices and standards for distributed computing.

SIENA is the first initiative to bring to the same table standardization bodies to support the analysis of open standards-based interoperable grid and cloud computing infrastructures. The SDOs that have contributed include: the Open Grid Forum (OGF), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE SA), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the Organization for the Adoption of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

The primary focus of the SIENA initiative is European electronic infrastructure for research. We therefore, take into consideration the points of view of both the people responsible for infrastructure creation and operation, such as service and application developers, and the “end users”, for example, researchers in science, the arts and humanities. The focus on standards and interoperability and the offer of services through European grid and cloud infrastructures will benefit the education sector, and will also be relevant for e-government and commercial enterprises that can take advantage of the substantial research background that underlies most e-infrastructures.

SIENA Roadmap Annexes

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 09:58:00 GMT

The SIENA roadmap assesses the situation, identifies issues, and makes recommendations regarding the adoption and evolution of open standards-based interoperable grid and cloud computing infrastructure (e-infrastructure) to support research in Europe. The vision for such a European e-infrastructure is to empower productivity of research communities through ubiquitous, trusted, and easy trans-national access to services for data, computation, communication and collaborative work. Some considerations in this roadmap apply also to computing in industry and the public sector.
The eleven recommendations constitute a “Call for Action” on all stakeholders involved in the development of European e-infrastructure. These recommendations have been formulated and divided into immediate short term priority actions, and actions with a medium-term timeframe. By short-term we mean within a maximum of twelve months, and by medium-term we mean a maximum of three years. These timeframes are the maximum amount of time that we feel it should take to complete each call for action, although we anticipate that each could be completed well within that timeframe. They take into account the life expectancies of the current DCI projects, and the probability of new calls for new projects by the European Commission.
The purpose of these annexes is to provide supplementary information on initiatives and issues broadly applicable to the SIENA roadmap. Annex 1 looks at Europe’s investments in distributed computing (supercomputing and grid) over the past decade, provides an overview of the six distributed computing infrastructures currently supported by the GÉANT and e-Infrastructure Unit of the European Commission. This Annex concludes with a short analysis of research infrastructures, considering how greater convergence with e-infrastructures might be achieved through the adoption of distributed computing (cloud, grid, supercomputing). Annex 2 is aimed at extending the analysis of the cloud landscape in Europe with particular reference to EC-funded initiatives that relate to the SIENA roadmap and more broadly e-infrastructures. Annex 3 details the sustainability strategy proposed for European cloud initiatives in general and distributed computing infrastructures. Annex 4 expands on international roadmapping activities and use scenario-standards mapping. A concise inventory of standards is provided. Annex 5 provides a legal brief, provided by PriceWaterHouse Cooper for the roadmap analysis with particular reference to Germany.

NSF Report on Support for Cloud Computing

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:29:51 GMT

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has laid out its support for cloud computing research in a report - "NSF Report on Support for Cloud Computing" which was submitted to the US Congress last week. In the report the NSF commits itself to providing the science and engineering communities with the opportunity to conduct research and education activities in cloud and data-intensive computing and their applications. The report outlines how the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate of NSF has funded six research areas which they see as having a high impact on cloud computing. These are identified in the report as being computer systems, computer networks, security and privacy, algorithms and data management, applications and software engineering, computer science education.
The report gives information on NSF work including CISE cloud computing awards into the aforementioned areas. In particular, awards in security and privacy include trustworthiness of cloud providers and protecting providers from the significant security and privacy threats that they face. The handling of massive data is also discussed with exploration of the challenges in scaling up and scaling out database operations to the extreme data sizes and levels of distribution that is present in the cloud environment.

Courtesy: National Science Foundation

Cloudscape IV - Trust, legal & security issues in cloud computing

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:28:55 GMT

Trust, legal and security issues are all major concerns in the adoption of cloud computing. Cloud computing has security issues which are common to other distributed technologies such as protection of infrastructure against abuse, security of user data, software and credentials; and security of physical machines and networks. Data and legal issues also represent a barrier to the widespread adoption of cloud computing. Divergent country specific laws and in particular national regulatory frameworks, for issues such as data location, often contrast with regional investment strategies of service providers and can prevent innovation and inhibit widespread adoption of services in the short to medium term.

Looking ahead to Cloudscape IV, 23-24 February 2012, in Brussels, this document gives an overview of the two hour session focussing on trust, legal and security issues of cloud computing, with disucussion on some of the current topics and information on the session participants.

Register now for Cloudscape IV.

Cloudscape IV - What are the Standards Bodies doing & how do they respond to challenges from the community?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:56:20 GMT

The shift towards cloud computing and virtualization to broaden infrastructure usage and complement services to researchers, is taking place in a complex and dynamic landscape where standards are still immature. Allied to this is the challenge of satisfying diverse requirements across cloud, grid and supercomputing to provide an ecosystem that will increment research productivity and innovation, underpinned by interoperable infrastructures.

This panel debate "What are the Standards Bodies doing & how do they respond to challenges from the community?" takes place on Thursday 23 February, 16:30 - 18:00, and will examine how SDOs are contributing in the state of play to progress the current cloud standards landscape. This session brings together representatives from SDOs to give their views on the current efforts to provide mature cloud standards in order to satisfy the requirements of industry and eInfrastructures.

Chaired by David Wallom, Associate Director – Innovation, OERC & SIENA Consortium, the debate will see representatives from key SDOs including OGF, SNIA, IEEE, ITU, DMTF, OASIS and ETSI.

Register Now for Cloudscape IV, 23-24 February 2012, Brussels, Belgium.

Cloudscape IV - Industry Talking Cloud interoperability - Barriers and Opportunities

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:39:15 GMT

A year ago, SIENA’s Cloudscape III examined the layers of Cloud interoperability. As the diversity of Cloud infrastructures (IaaS) and platforms (PaaS) offerings grow, we’re seeing a greater concern for needed flexibility from both customers and providers, where interoperability scenarios are a chief component.

This summary gives an overview of the "Industry Talking Cloud interoperability - Barriers and Opportunities" session which takes place at Cloudscape IV, 11:00 - 13:00, Friday 24 February 2012.

Chaired by Markus Pleier, SNIA Europe Technology Co-Chair and CTO EMEA at EMCsession will see presentations from EuroCIOs, EuroCloud, the European Space Agency, the VISION Cloud project and SAP.

Cloudscape IV - Cloud computing for European scientific research user communities

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:23:00 GMT

Cloud computing for European scientific research user communities – interoperability use cases
11:00 – 13:00, Thursday 23 February 2012

How can cloud computing best support scientific research in Europe and how key is interoperability in this? This session looks to shed light on this issue with insight into interoperability use-cases from a number of EC-funded projects . This document gives a snapshot into some of the areas covered in the session with insight into StratusLab, VENUS-C, EGI and OpenNebula.

Cloudscape IV – Advances in Interoperability & Cloud Computing Standards

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:16:00 GMT

Cloud computing is moving at an incredibly fast pace, calling for more flexible and swifter responses not only to address adoption barriers but also take up of new opportunities. In the scientific arena, data intensive problems are gaining significant success with cloud computing as they have the closely coupled structure well supported in clouds and are typically “new applications” that are attractive to build from scratch with programming models suited for clouds.

Cloudscape IV, 23-24 February aims to drive forward the priority actions captured in the SIENA Roadmap by placing interoperability, data portability, legal impediments and security high on the agenda. This document gives an overview of the event as a whole presenting some of the key note presenters and sessions.

Cloudscape IV - International Perspectives on Global Developments in Cloud Computing

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:33:00 GMT

With the fast pace of change of cloud computing internationally SIENA has synergized with international bodies such as the US National Institute of Standards (NIST), the US National Science Foundation, and the Japanese-led initiative the Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum (GICTF).

Day 1 of Cloudscape IV will see a presentation from Dawn Leaf, Senior Advisor at NIST's Information Technology Laboratory, and the NIST Senior Executive for Cloud Computing which will focus on cloud computing use-cases with particlular emphasis on US Government use of cloud solutions.

Day two of Cloudscape IV will launch immediately into the international debate with a panel discussion including representatives from the Brazil, Europe, Japan and the US. The debate will focus on global developments in cloud computing for science and future collaborations with Europe.

This document gives an overview of the sessions and also looks at how SIENA has interacted with NIST in exploring how European DCI projects have already collaborated on sharing knowledge on NIST Cloud deployment scenarios as part of the NIST Cloud Technology Roadmap.