2–6 Mar 2009
Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy
Europe/Rome timezone

Session

From Grids to Clouds, a workshop for Grid users facing the Cloud

5 Mar 2009, 09:00
Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy

Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy

Viale Africa 95100 Catania

Description

From Grids to Clouds, a workshop for Grid users facing the Cloud (1/3) (90 mins)
Avner Algom, Wolfgang Gentzsch, Ignacio M. Llorente, and Martin Walker

Cloud computing services, as offered by companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, Salesforce, Sun, and others, is on its way to become an important component of enterprise IT, adding a new, ‘external’ dimension of flexibility by enhancing one’s internal IT resource capacity when needed. The question still remains how suitable the Cloud services model will be for the capacity and capability computing demands of the HPC community, in research and industry.

While grids and virtualization provide the ‘plumbing’ to enable seamless access to distributed resources, clouds denote services on a pay-per-use basis. Grids stand out because of their flexible, dynamic, feature-rich resources and thus are complex by their very nature. Cloud applications will likely follow similar strategies as grid-enabling ones. Just as challenging, though, are the cultural, mental, legal, and political aspects of clouds. Building trust and reputation among the users and the providers will certainly help in many simple scenarios. But it is still a challenge to imagine users easily entrusting their corporate assets and sensitive data to cloud service providers.

This workshop will provide the Grid user community with solid information from renown experts in the field, about the innovative potential of the new Cloud technologies and services for their research and business. We will start with the different views of Cloud computing and the differences, benefits, and barriers compared to Grids. We continue presenting experiences and scenarios by organizations and projects to illustrate how Cloud computing can support Grid infrastructures, and provide an overview of some relevant technological components to build Cloud services. Finally, we will look at challenges and future of Cloud computing, focusing on open standards common to Grids and Clouds, legal issues and key challenges on specific domains support, interoperability, SLA, privacy and security. The workshop will close with a panel discussion.

SESSION 1: The Different Views of Cloud Computing
Coordinator: Martin Walker

AIM: Presentation of positions by experts to share and discuss the different views of cloud computing and their novelty with respect to the current state of Grid computing. Presentations will focus on providing a clear definition of cloud computing, its real difference with Grid Computing and barriers for adoption. This session will try to give an answer to the following questions:
· what's the real difference between grid and cloud and why could this be important to me
· now that I have (invested in) a grid, why should I and how can I transform (part of) this into a cloud
· now that I (almost) understand the barriers to grid, where are the barriers of cloud computing and how can they be overcome

SPEAKERS, EXPERTS SUGGESTED: (4 20-minute presentations)
· Dennis Gannon (Indiana University): http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/~gannon/#Research
· Cal Loomis (CNRS and EGEE NA4 coordinator)/Marc Elian Bégin (Sixsq): Authors of EGEE Report “Clouds and grids - evolution or revolution?”
· Ian Foster or co-worker (University of Chicago): He has just organized a quite nice workshop on Cloud Computing and its Applications (http://www.cca08.org/)
· Andre Merzky, Shantenu Jha (Louisiana University), Geoffrey Fox (Indiana University): Authors of the OGF Report “Using Clouds to Provide Grids Higher-Levels of Abstraction and Explicit Support for Usage Modes”

SESSION 2: Experiences about Grid Computing on Cloud
Coordinator: Wolfgang Gentzsch, DEISA

AIM: Presentation/demonstration of experiences and scenarios by organizations/projects to illustrate how Cloud computing can support Grid infrastructures. Presentation will describe both application and provision scenarios, focusing on the benefits obtained.

EXPERIENCES SUGGESTED: (5 – 6 15-minute presentations)
· Condor Pool on Clouds (Cycle Computing)
· The RESERVOIR Project: "The Reservoir Utility Computing Use Case". Presentation from Sun Microsystems. http://www.reservoir-fp7.eu/
· Grid-Ireland (They have evaluated the limitations of virtualization and cloud in production Grids, see http://www.terena.org/activities/nrens-n-grids/workshop-07/slides/3_virtualising_production.pdf)
· The Cumulus Project: Build a Scientific Cloud for a Data Center (University of Karlsruhe). They have early experiences of Cloud computing for data centers (www.cca08.org/speakers/wang.php)
· Cloud Computing for parallel Scientific HPC Applications (MIT). They have evaluated the feasibility of Running Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Climate Models on Amazon's EC2 (www.cca08.org/speakers/evangelinos.php)
· Mathias Dalheimer, Fraunhofer ITW Institute in Kaiserslautern, integrating EC2 services into the Fraunhofer PHASTGrid.
· Alatum from SCS in Singapore, which they say is a Grid but in fact it’s a Cloud: www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Commercial_Grid_Alatum_Launched_in_Singapore.html
· Ewa Deelman, USC ISI, Clouds: An Opportunity for Scientific Applications, see slides at: http://www.cyfronet.pl/cgw08/programme.html

SESSION 3: An Open-Source Technological Approach
Coordinator: Ignacio M. Llorente, Complutense University of Madrid

AIM: Presentation/demonstration of relevant technological components to build Cloud services by organization/projects to show the state of Cloud technology. Presentation should focus on the benefits and limitations of the technology and its position in the cloud ecosystem. This session will try to give an answer to the following questions:
· what are currently the most interesting (and important) open source software components to 'lego' a cloud.

TECHNOLOGIES SUGGESTED: (5 – 6 15-minute presentations)
· Grid Gain – Java Gateway to Cloud Computing (Grid Gain)
· The OpenNebula VM Manager (www.OpenNebula.org/)
· Globus Nimbus (workspace.globus.org/)
· Eucalyptus (eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/)
· Hadoop (hadoop.apache.org)
· NC State University Virtual Computing Lab: see http://www.virtualizationstrategies.com/category/cloud-computing
Key VCL people at NC State are Sam Averitt, Eric Sills, Mladen Vouk. Slides: http://vcl.ncsu.edu/sites/default/files/VCL-ICVCI052008.pdf
· Haizea, Ian Foster and Borja Sotomayor (haizea.cs.uchicago.edu)
· EnginFrame Cloud Portal (linked to Cloud technology like e.g. OpenNebula)

SESSION 4: Challenges and Future of Cloud Computing
Coordinator: Avner Algom, IGT

AIM: Presentation of research and operation challenges by groups/projects. Presentation should focus on open standards common to Grids and Clouds, legal issues and key challenges on specific domains support, interoperability, SLA, privacy and security. This session will try to give an answer to the following questions:
· how can standards (and which ones) be useful to build a cloud, or connect my cluster/grid to a cloud.

GROUPS/PROJECTS SUGGESTED: (2 – 3 15-minute presentations)
· Grid & Virtualization OGF WG (www.ogf.org/gf/group_info/view.php?group=gridvirt-wg)
· SLA@SOI European Project (www.sla-at-soi.eu)

PANEL DISCUSSION (5-10-minute presentations + discussions)
· Benny Rochwerger (IBM Haifa): Challenges and Future of Cloud
· Avner giving a brief summary and lessons learned on the Cloud Summit
· Martin giving a brief summary and lessons learned on the Cloudscape Workshop
· Wolfgang, giving a brief summary on DEISA on its way to an HPC Cloud
· Ignacio giving a brief summary about the integration of cloud-like technologies into future e-infrastructures
· All, summarizing their respective Session

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