H2020 IOStack

Partners

Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) 

Description: The University Rovira i Virgili is a mid-sized University with approximately 12.000 students and 950 lecturers. The URV has eleven faculties and schools, which teach fifty different courses in the areas of health sciences, social sciences, humanities, technology and experimental sciences. URV is one of the top spanish research Universities in productivity and impact related to its size. At the Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics, the research group of Architecture and Telematic Services will participate in this project. This research group has experience in large scale distributed systems including peer-to-peer networks and cloud computing, and software engineering and middleware. The group has participated in national and european research projects with solid contributions in the distributed systems fields. The group is currently contributing to the OpenStack consortium through the open source StackSync project and it has extensive experience with OpenStack Swift.

Tasks: The URV group is leading WP1 (management) and WP2(Architecture). The URV group has experience in project coordination and it is currently leading the FP7 CloudSpaces project. Regarding WP2, the group has strong expertise in software engineering and middleware for large-scale distributed systems systems. Furthermore, we also have significant contributions to WP3 (SDS toolkit) and WP4 (SDS services). In WP3 we will be involved in the definition of APIs for data services, and in the specifications of extensible data interception services. In WP4 we will contribute to data reduction techniques where we have previous experience in storage systems. To wit, we outline a recent PhD entitled:“On the Design and Optimization of Heterogeneous Distributed Storage Systems”.

IBM Haifa Research Labs (IBM) 

Description: The IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL) was founded in 1972. The lab has grown steadily, now employing over 500 researchers working in areas such as systems and storage technologies, Cloud Compute, information retrieval, security, and more. HRL is currently one of IBM’s main European centers for innovation.HRL is a centre of competence in cloud computing, supporting IBM worldwide in this area. In particular, Storage Cloud is a key activity at HRL. Our Cloud Platforms group led a number of milestone FP7 projects, including the RESERVOIR project, which addressed the challenges of cloud-scale service deployment, the VISION Cloud addressing an optimized Cloud infrastructure for storage intensive services, ENSURE, which addressed long term digital storage on the cloud. As part of those projects HRL addressed numerous aspects of cloud computing and the interplay between compute and storage in the cloud. Furthermore, IBM Haifa is an active contributor to OpenStack. IBM brings its expertise in extension mechanisms, Storlets and Middleware, for cloud storage and Swift in particular which have been developed in various EU projects.Furthermore, various optimizations including placement, compression and deduplication havebeen studied and developed at HRL.

Tasks: In the IOStack project HRL will lead WP5 on data services that will focus on instrumenting true native analytics support in a cloud based object store. The contribution will include developing proper APIs for such analytics and implementing of the storlets based compute mechanism within an object storage (most likely OpenStack Swift). In addition HRL will contribute to performance and cost optimizations via data reduction and other methods.

Eurecom (EUR) 

Description: EURECOM is a graduate school of engineering and research institute in telecommunications located in Sophia Antipolis, France. It is organized as a consortium of industrial and academic members including EPFL, Télécom Paris, Swisscom, THALES, SFR, ORANGE, ST ERICSSON, CISCO, BMW Group Research and Technology, Monaco Telecom, Symantec, SAP and European Universities (Politecnico di Torino in Italy, Helsinki University of Technology TKK, in Finland, Technische Universität Munchen in Germany, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway). EURECOM employs about 70 scientists in three research departments: networking and security, multimedia, and mobile communications. The networking and security department focuses on distributed systems, computer applications and the underlying communication mechanisms. The department has participated in a large number of national and EU projects such as BIGFOOT, CLOUDSPACES, A4CLOUD, FIGARO, VIS-SENSE, RECOGNITION, I-CODE and many more.

In particular, the involvment of EURECOM in IOStack materializes through the Distributed Systems Group (DSG), lead by Prof. Pietro Michiardi. The DSG is a internationally renowned group that blends theory and system research in the domain of large-scale distributed systems and algorithms. In addition to research, the group is characterized by an active participation to various open-source communities, including that of Apache Hadoop and that of Apache Spark.

Tasks: EUR leads WP5 (Big Data Analytics as a Service) and actively participates to WP2, that concerns the IOStack Architecture. Regarding WP5, EURECOM has a strong experience in scalable computing frameworks, including Apache Hadoop and Spark, both at the system level (e.g. by introducing several new core components for Hadoop) and at the algorithm design level (e.g. by being active in the domain of modeling algorithmic execution, scalable machine learning algorithm design, and scalable time series analytics). In addition, EURECOM has has several years of experience in operating a private cloud deployment supporting both teaching and research for EURECOM.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) 

Description: The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), established in 2005, serves as the National Supercomputing Facility in Spain. The mission of the BSC-CNS is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. The BSC-CNS not only strives to become a first-class research centre in supercomputing, but also in scientific fields that demand high performance computing resources such as the Life and Earth Sciences. Following this approach, the BSC-CNS has brought together a critical mass of top-notch researchers, high performance computing experts and cutting edge supercomputing technologies in order to foster multidisciplinary scientific collaboration and innovation.

Personnel of BSC-CNS taking part to the project are members of the Computer Sciences Department of the BSC-CNS. More precisely, they are members of the Storage System group that has an extensive experience with data management in all levels. The group works from the node level to wide-area distributed level. In the node level, the group has contributed on new file systems and optimizations of the I/O stack. At the cluster level, several contributions on cooperative caches as well as heterogeneous and scalable storage systems have been achieved. Finally, the Storage System Group has worked on replica management and location in XtreemFS, which is a wide-area file system proposed in the context of the EU XtreemOS IP Project.

Tasks: The main tasks assigned to BSC are in WP3 (SDS Toolkit) and WP5 (Data Services). On WP3, the group will participate on the performance (bandwidth, latency) control of the control plane of the SDS toolkit. On WP4, the group plans to introduce several data services contributing with features like deduplication, compression, or caches going from hot data cache to intelligent prefetchers and filters. Finally, the group will contribute to WP2, as the group has knowledge of lower layers (I/O Path) and will support the consortium on these topics.

Mpstor (MPS) 

Description: Mpstor is a leading developer of storage and cloud management software products since 2006, providing solutions through hardware OEMs and System Integrators (as well as direct) to data centres who are seeking a flexible, scalable and resilient platform on which to build a storage, public cloud or private cloud service.

Mpstor’s core expertise is in software-defined storage, which provides the service consumer with invisible, programmable and automated storage infrastructure, creating the perception of infinite flexibility in terms of scale and quality of service. Through it’s patented Virtual Block Store (VBS) technology, the ‘intelligence’ in the storage service is abstracted from the underlying storage device and runs as a virtual software device manager. This allows any number of storage services to be deployed quickly across shared, commodity hardware, increasing flexibility and asset utilization while reducing opex and capex costs. Mpstor’s engineers have storage in their DNA, many having over twenty years of software and hardware storage design experience. We pride ourselves in providing reliable, easy-to-use and easy-to-support software products and we work closely with our OEM and system integrator partners to deliver full turnkey solutions.

Tasks: MPS is leading two WPs: WP3 (SDS Toolkit) and WP6 (Dissemination). Thanks to their expertise in Software-defined Storage in their Orkestra product they will will lead the disaggregation of computing and storage resources thanks to SDS in WP3. They will design APIs in WP2 and WP3 to enable SDS services to enable efficient virtualized analytics applications. MPS will also lead the dissemination and exploitation activities in WP6.

IDIADA Automotive Technology SA (IDA) 

Description: IDIADA, as a global partner to the automotive industry, provides complete solutions for automotive development projects worldwide. IDIADA’s Technical Centre is located 70 km south of Barcelona (Spain), having subsidiaries and branch offices in several European, American and Asian countries with a total work force of more than 1800 employees world-wide in 24 countries. The core services IDIADA provides are: Engineering, Proving Ground and Homologation. Main fields of engineering activity are power train, emissions, noise & vibration, vehicle dynamics, electronics, fatigue & durability and passive safety. Additionally, IDIADA has also a high level of international recognition even in non-European countries: South America, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Gulf Countries, etc. It is able of carrying out tests according to standards valid for self-certification (USA, Canada, and Australia). The IT department is responsible for developing and maintaining of all enterprise applications, currently has a team of twenty people that support 1800 users spread across 24 different countries.

Tasks: The main tasks assigned to IDIADA are in WP2, where the validation of the IOStack toolkit will be addressed through our use case. The intent is to provide a real scenario in which the outcomes of the project will be tested and evaluated.

GridPocket (GDP) 

Description: GridPocket SAS is a venture capital founded, fast growing, technology company, created in 2009, and specialized in the energy efficiency web applications. The company has its R&D offices in France and Poland, and it is active on the European energy market. GridPocket is one of the very first companies in the world to provide highly scalable value added service platforms dedicated to the smart metering applications. GridPocket core technology includes high performance data processing, energy predictive expert systems and consumer’s behavioral analysis protocols. GridPocket has been labeled “Innovate Enterprise” by CapEnergies, a national competitive cluster, founded, among the others, by EDF (French Electricity Utility) and CEA (Atomic Energy Commission). It has been awarded grants for a pilot deployment in the south of France. The research project initiated and coordinated by GridPocket (“Grid-Teams”) has won a prestigious French national award “Green Digital Growth Award” in 2011. GridPocket cooperates with large research centers such as Telecom ParisTech, Eurecom, Mines ParisTech, INRIA, and University of Life Science in Warsaw (SGGW). GridPocket contributes its technological expertise in energy-related value added services to the activities of several public-interest organizations, including ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and CRE (French Energy Regulations Commission).

Tasks: The main tasks assigned to GridPocket are in WP2, where the validation of the IOStack toolkit will be addressed through our use case. The intent is to provide a real scenario in which the outcomes of the project will be tested and evaluated.

ARCTUR (ARC) 

Description: Established in 1992, Arctur has progressed to become the main Slovenian commercial supplier of HPC (High Performance Computing) services and solutions. Arctur has its own HPC infrastructure to be used as the technological foundation for advanced HPC and Cloud computing solutions and innovative web services in a distributed, high-redundancy environment. The company has extensive experience in server virtualization and deployment, integration of disparate IT-systems, IT support of project-management and server farm leverage for the deployment of Software as a Service (SaaS), specialised for small and media enterprises (SME). Understanding the importance of continuous progress, Arctur has its own R&D department, registered with the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS). Arctur is involved in joint R&D projects with research institutes, universities and other R&D organizations from EU and globally, currently we are partners in two FP7 projects from I4MS initiative: Fortissimo and CloudFlow. The research areas covered are directly implemented in various real-life solutions and products, e.g. web and mobile applications, easy to use interfaces for HPC, ICT security and Cyber Physical Systems. Other research areas include applied mathematics, numerical simulations, advanced statistics, and HPC/Cloud computing.

Tasks: The main tasks assigned to Arctur are in WP2, where the validation of the IOStack toolkit will be addressed through our use case. The intent is to provide an IaaS infrastructure in our data center in which the outcomes of the project will be tested and evaluated. In particular, Arctur will offer a Big Data Analytics as a Service infrastructure over OpenStack Sahara thanks tou IOStack SDS software. Arctur data center aims to become a realistic playground for real experiments in the IOStack project.