CLOSER 2011 Abstracts

Area 1 - Cloud Computing Fundamentals
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Services Science Foundation for Cloud Computing
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 3 - Cloud Computing Platforms and Applications
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 4 - Cloud Computing Enabling Technology
Full Papers Short Papers

Area 1 - Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 76
Title:

MULTI-RING STRUCTURED OVERLAY NETWORK FOR THE INTER-CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Sumeth Lerthirunwong, Hitoshi Sato and Satoshi Matsuoka
Abstract: Although the Inter-Cloud environment enables new possibilities for several data-intensive e-Sciences applications, some challenging issues such as dynamic change of computing resources and management complexity of large-scale overlay network remain. The structured peer-to-peer overlay network approach is hereby adapted onto the Inter-Cloud environment to manage the consistency of the global information among clouds and enhance the churn resistance. We propose a multi-ring structured overlay network for the Inter-Cloud environment, in which nodes are organized into one sub-ring and all sub-rings are then composed to form a large single ring structured network. The global information is managed within the sub-ring so that the cost and the complexity for managing the global information can be reduced significantly. We evaluate the efficiency of our proposed methodology by using overlay network simulator and compare the results with other existing overlay networks. Moreover, several scenarios are further analyzed to show the effectiveness in real-world cases. The results indicate that, with our approach, the management cost for global information is reduced while the stability of the overlay network under churn can be maintained. The average reachability of network under churn is more than 89.2% which is better than other structured networks and by considering locality of node, the number of the distant messages also decreases by 58.4% with respect to the overall messages.
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Paper Nr: 93
Title:

SECURE VIRTUALIZATION - Benefits, Risks and Controls
Authors:

Mariana Carroll, Paula Kotzé and Alta van der Merwe
Abstract: Cloud computing is changing the IT delivery model to provide on-demand self-service access to a shared pool of computing resources (physical and virtual) via broad network access to offer reduced costs, scalability, flexibility, capacity utilization, higher efficiencies and mobility. In many instances cloud computing builds on the capabilities of a virtualized computing infrastructure enabling multi-tenancy, scalability and a highly abstracted cloud model. Even though cloud computing provides compelling benefits and cost-effective options for IT hosting and expansion, security of applications and data remains a number one business objective. It is therefore essential to ensure adequate security not only for cloud computing, but also for the underlying technologies enabling cloud computing. Management should understand and analyse risks in order to safeguard systems and data. The focus of this paper is on mitigation for virtualization security risks as a fundamental step towards secure cloud computing environments.
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Paper Nr: 101
Title:

TOWARDS AUTONOMIC MARKET MANAGEMENT IN CLOUD COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURES
Authors:

Ivan Breskovic, Michael Maurer, Vincent C. Emeakaroha, Ivona Brandic and Jörn Altmann
Abstract: Cloud computing markets face challenges, such as a large variety of different resource types in the market. A large variety of resource types results in a low number of matches of ask and bids. Consequently, the market has a low liquidity, which is economically inefficient and can lead to market failure. To counteract this problem, SLA templates (i.e., templates for electronic contracts) have been introduced. However, until now, SLA templates were static, not able to reflect changes in users' requirements. In this paper, we apply the adaptive SLA mapping approach for deriving public SLA templates from private SLA templates of users. To achieve the adaptation of SLA templates, we combine clustering algorithms with adaptation methods. The result is a set of new public SLA templates, which reflect the market situation more accurately. This way, we enable marketplaces to automatically adapt to observed changes of market conditions. For the simulation-based evaluation of our approach, we formalize a utility and cost model, calculate the overall net utility, and assess the scalability of the approach. Our results show that the use of clustering algorithms can significantly improve the performance of the adaptive SLA mapping approach.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 26
Title:

A GENERAL-PURPOSE AND MULTI-LEVEL SCHEDULING APPROACH IN ENERGY EFFICIENT COMPUTING
Authors:

Mehdi Sheikhalishahi, Manoj Devare, Lucio Grandinetti and Demetrio Lagan
Abstract: Green computing denotes energy efficiency in all components of computing systems i.e. hardware, software, local area and etc. In this work, we explore software part of green computing in computing paradigms in general. Energy efficient computing has to achieve manifold objectives of energy consumption optimization and utilization improvement for computing paradigms that are not pay-per-use such as cluster and grid, and revenue maximization as another additional metric for cloud computing model. We propose a multi-level and general-purpose scheduling approach for energy efficient computing. Some parts of this approach such as consolidation are well defined for IaaS cloud paradigm, however it is not limited to IaaS cloud model. We discuss policies, models, algorithms and cloud pricing strategies in general. In particular, wherever it is applicable we explain our solutions in the context of Haizea. Through experiments, we show big improvement in utilization and energy consumption in a static setting as workloads run with lower frequencies and energy optimization correlates with utilization improvement.
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Paper Nr: 38
Title:

DEALING WITH ROGUE VIRTUAL MACHINES IN A CLOUD SERVICES ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

B. Colbert and L. M. Batten
Abstract: In current cloud services hosting solutions, various mechanisms have been developed to minimize the possibility of hosting staff from breaching security. However, while functions such as replicating and moving machines are legitimate actions in clouds, we show that there are risks in administrators being able to perform them. We describe three threat scenarios related to hosting staff on the cloud architecture and indicate how an appropriate accountability architecture can mitigate these risks in the sense that the attacks can be detected and the perpetrators identified. We identify requirements and future research and development needed to protect cloud service environments from these attacks.
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Paper Nr: 52
Title:

ACCOUNTABLE REPUTATION RANKING SCHEMES FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS IN CLOUD COMPUTING
Authors:

Wassim Itani, Cesar Ghali, Ayman Kayssi and Ali Chehab
Abstract: We present RaaS (Reputation as a Service), a set of accountable reputation ranking schemes for service providers in cloud computing architectures. RaaS provides a secure reputation reporting system producing results and recommendations that can be published as a service and verified by trusted third parties or by the cloud service providers themselves. The reputation service is based on an assortment of ranking criteria ranging from multilevel performance and quality of service measures to security and pricing assessments. This makes RaaS a valuable IT component in supporting verifiable and accountable compliance with service-level agreements and regulatory policies, encouraging competition among cloud providers for better security and quality of service, and providing new and existing cloud customers with valuable advice for selecting the appropriate cloud service provider(s) that suit their performance, budgeting, and security requirements. The RaaS reputation system does not rely on subjective feedback from cloud customers but rather carry out the reputation calculation based on observable actions extracted from the computing cloud itself. A proof of concept implementation shows that the incorporated RaaS protocols impose minimal overhead on the overall system performance.
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Paper Nr: 56
Title:

A TAXONOMY MODEL FOR CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES
Authors:

Nelson M. Gonzalez, Charles C. Miers, Fernando F. Redígolo, Marcos Simplício, Tereza C. M. B. Carvalho, Mats Näslund and Makan Pourzandi
Abstract: The continuous development of cloud computing is in evidence in several academic and non-academic researches. However, the relative youth of this field has produced several distinct definitions and taxonomies regarding the concept of cloud computing, as well as the classification and organization of such services. The appearance of commercial cloud solutions in this context with no firmly established standards only complicates the matter, making it difficult to determine how solutions should be technically identified and qualified. Therefore, with the growing complexity of the area, identifying, clarifying and classifying cloud services are essential steps to understand their organization, purpose and interaction with other services. With this goal in mind, this article presents a study on existing concepts and taxonomies, and then harmonizes these approaches in an extensible taxonomy model for cloud computing services. More specifically, this proposal builds on the SPI (Software, Platform, and Infrastructure) taxonomy created by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), creating a hierarchical organization that groups different services according to their characteristics; the result is a taxonomy model that allows finer-grained analyses to be performed, while essentially keeping the simplicity of SPI itself. Finally, we present a specific instance of this model focused on existing and representative cloud services.
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Paper Nr: 86
Title:

PREVENTION OF INFORMATION HARVESTING IN A CLOUD SERVICES ENVIRONMENT

Authors:

L. M. Batten, J. Abawajy and R. Doss
Abstract: We consider a cloud data storage involving three entities, the cloud customer, the cloud business centre which provides services, and the cloud data storage centre. Data stored in the data storage centre comes from a variety of customers and some of these customers may compete with each other in the market place or may own data which comprises confidential information about their own clients. Cloud staff have access to data in the data storage centre which could be used to steal identities or to compromise cloud customers. In this paper, we provide an efficient method of data storage which prevents staff from accessing data which can be abused as described above. We also suggest a method of securing access to data which requires more than one staff member to access it at any given time. This ensures that, in case of a dispute, a staff member always has a witness to the fact that she accessed data.
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Paper Nr: 98
Title:

OVERCAST SKIES - What Cloud Computing Should Be?
Authors:

Mark Wallis, Frans Henskens and Michael Hannaford
Abstract: From an consumer perspective the Cloud is opaque. Online storage and the rise of web applications are changing the way users work. There continues though to be no distinction from a user experience point of view between accessing a Cloud-based application and accessing a web application deployed on a classic server. We propose a new paradigm for online application development which takes the best from web applications, thick client applications and the new ”application store” market. This approach expands the cloud to encompass all resources that belong to a user; be it local client resources or server-farm resources procured using a traditional cloud model. By implementing these concepts we can bring the benefits of cloud computing directly to the end user while breaking developers out of the confines of the web browser.
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Paper Nr: 115
Title:

DEFINING GENERIC ARCHITECTURE FOR CLOUD IAAS PROVISIONING MODEL
Authors:

Yuri Demchenko, Cees de Laat and Aleksej Mavrin
Abstract: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one of the provisioning models for Clouds as defined in the NIST Clouds definition. Although widely used, current IaaS implementations and solutions doesn’t have common and well defined architecture model. The paper attempts to define a generic architecture for IaaS based on current research by authors in developing novel architectural framework for Infrastructure Services On-Demand (ISOD) provisioning that is originated from the telecommunication and networking area and allows for combined network and IT resources provisioning. The paper proposes the Composable Services Architecture (CSA) for dynamically configurable virtualised services. The proposed CSA includes such important component as the Services Delivery Framework (CSA SDF) that defines the services provisioning workflow and supporting infrastructure for provisioned services lifecycle management. The CSA SDF extends existing lifecycle management frameworks with additional stages such as “Registration and Synchronisation” and “Provisioning Session Binding” that specifically target such scenarios as the provisioned services recovery or re-planning/migration and provide necessary mechanisms for consistent security services provisioning as an important component of the provisioned on-demand infrastructure. The paper also describes the GEMBus (GEANT Multidomain Bus) that is considered as a CSA middleware platform. The presented architecture is the result of the on-going cooperative effort of the two EU projects GEANT3 JRA3 Composable Services and GEYSERS.
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Paper Nr: 120
Title:

FUNCTIONAL DOMAIN CONCEPTS IN THE MODELLING OF CLOUD STRUCTURES AND THE BEHAVIOUR OF INTEGRATED POLICY-BASED SYSTEMS THROUGH THE USE OF ABSTRACTION CLASSES
Authors:

Jonathan Eccles and George Loizou
Abstract: We succinctly summarise the various current approaches encountered in Policy-Based Control of Functional Networking within Cloud Structures by integrating these concepts with those of Profile generation, and generic environment representation, based on Entity-Relationship (ER) and Class-Based Modelling. The subsequent problems that this integration gives rise to are identified and discussed. We present a generic solution to these problems, which has been partially implemented, and show how this work is being extended using the concept of Abstraction Classes. We indicate further work to be undertaken in this area.
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Paper Nr: 127
Title:

A REFERENCE MODEL FOR DEVELOPING CLOUD APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Mohammad Hamdaqa, Tassos Livogiannis and Ladan Tahvildari
Abstract: Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift that involves dynamic provisioning of shared computing resources on demand. It is a pay-as-you-go model that offers computing resources as a service in an attempt to reduce IT capital and operating expenditures. The problem is that current software architectures lack elements such as those related to address elasticity, virtualization and billing. These elements are needed in the design of cloud applications. Moreover, there is no generic cloud software architecture for designing and building cloud applications. To further complicate the problem, each platform provider has different standards that influence the way applications are written. This ties cloud users to a particular provider. This paper will focus on defining a reference model for cloud computing; more particularly, it presents a meta-model that shows the main cloud vocabulary and design elements, the set of configuration rules, and the semantic interpretation. It is always important to understand the abstract architecture of a system, and then tackle platform-specific issues. This separation of concerns allows for better maintainability, and facilitate applications portability.
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Paper Nr: 148
Title:

COOPERATIVE COMMUNITY CLOUDS FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES - Facilitating Cloud Computing for Small and Medium Enterprises with the Cooperative Paradigm
Authors:

Till Haselmann, Gottfried Vossen, Stefanie Lipsky and Theurl Theresia
Abstract: Cloud computing, or more generally cloud services, ought to be particularly attractive for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). According to expert opinion, these enterprises should be able to benefit overproportionally from outsourced IT services due to a variety of reasons. As of today, however, many SMEs still refrain from adopting cloud services because they do not trust the cloud service provider sufficiently and they cannot assess the legal implications of using cloud services. In this paper, we present an argument in favor of a cooperative community cloud that applies the paradigm of a cooperative to cloud operations. We sketch our vision of a “trustworthy” cloud, argue for its viability, and identify areas for future research.
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Paper Nr: 159
Title:

A GENERIC SERVICE INTERFACE FOR CLOUD NETWORKS
Authors:

Manolis Sifalakis, C. Tschudin, S. Martin, L. S. Ferreira and L. M. Correia
Abstract: Two major challenges for enabling the vision of cloud computing regard (a) the generic and multi-purpose access to (virtualised) resources, and (b) the flexible, dynamic, and on-demand composition of services vertically from the physical link level, all the way “up” to the application level. Both aspects require a respective flexibility and expressibility from the interfaces in-place, which is missing from the current static socket (and other) interfaces below the application level. In this position paper, we propose, explain and exemplify an alternative generic service interface (GSi) that borrows from object oriented design to enable properties such as polymorphic access, generic service composition, introspection and dynamic reconfigurability, of in-network resources; opening in this way the path for flexible creation of service clouds.
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Paper Nr: 165
Title:

TRANSCLOUD - Design Considerations for a High-performance Cloud Architecture Across Multiple Administrative Domains
Authors:

Andy C. Bavier, Marco Yuen, Jessica Blaine, Rick McGeer, Alvin Au Young, Yvonne Coady, Chris Matthews, Chris Pearson, Alex Snoeren and Joe Mambretti
Abstract: In this position paper, we consider architectures of distributed interconnected clouds across geographically distributed, independently-administered storage and computation clusters. We consider two problems: federation of access across heterogeneous administrative domains and computation jobs run over the wide area and heterogeneous data sets. We argue that a single, flexible architecture, analogous to the TCP/IP stack for networking, is sufficient to support these jobs, and outline its major elements. As with the networking stack, many elements are in place today to build an initial version of this architecture over existing facilities. With the sponsorship of the US National Science Foundation GENI project and the cooperation of the EU FIRE project, we are building an initial implementation, the TransCloud. We describe our initial results.
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Paper Nr: 167
Title:

COMMUNITY CLUSTER OR COMMUNITY CLOUD? - Utilizing our Own Bare-metal
Authors:

Xin Fan, Yusuke Wada and Shigeru Kusakabe
Abstract: The increasing availability of cloud computing technologies enables us to have an option we had not before: using private cloud as well as using public cloud. In this paper, we report our ongoing work on examining effectiveness of private cloud computing in an academic setting. Many researchers have examined the relative computational performance of commercially available public cloud computing offerings using HPC application benchmarks. As one of the driving forces in using cloud technologies is cost effectiveness, some researchers have examined public cloud offerings and their HPC environment, a community cluster, from a view point of cost-performance. Part of the conclusions indicates their community cluster may be favorable for typical community members. Due to the similar grounds of community cluster, we expect private (or community) cloud is promising in academic settings. Academic community members may also have interest in utilization of their resources with a configuration of less constraints compared to public cloud offerings while receiving benefit of cloud technologies. In this paper, we discuss the situation we are managing a number of bare-metals and we are deciding whether we configure the computing resource as a cluster of bare-metal nodes or as a cluster of virtual machines by using cloud computing technologies. According to our preliminary evaluation results, while we can easily reinstall and change the software framework on clusters in our private cloud, we must be ready for occurrence of unexpectedly severe performance degradation.
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Paper Nr: 170
Title:

CLOUD COMPUTING FRAMEWORK - A Framework to Evaluate Cloud Computing for IT Service Providers
Authors:

Rebecca Bulander and Julian Dengler
Abstract: Cloud Computing will be one of the most important technology triggers in the information technology for the next two to five years. Thus companies which provide IT solutions have to evaluate Cloud Computing in the context of their customer-driven IT projects. For this evaluation of Cloud Computing there is a need for a comprehensive framework to analyse the project scenario, the requirements of costumers and business scenario of the IT provider. Therefore this paper provides an approach of a comprehensive evaluation model of Cloud Computing for a prospective Cloud Computing provider and includes all necessary aspects of customer-driven IT projects.
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Paper Nr: 19
Title:

A COLLABORATIVE RESOURCE-BASED CLOUD ARCHITECTURE FOR FREIGHT LOGISTICS
Authors:

Bill Karakostas and Takis Katsoulakos
Abstract: Collaborative Cloud is the set of Cloud infrastructure, processes and standards, that allows companies to expose data and information as virtual resources, and manage them in collaboration with their partners and customers. The concept of Collaborative Cloud is realised with technologies such as global identifiers, data oriented services and content based messaging. The paper illustrates the application of Collaborative Cloud to a shipping logistics business to government (B2G) scenario called Single Window.
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Paper Nr: 27
Title:

CLOUD-BASED IT MANAGEMENT IMPACTS - Qualitative Weaknesses and Strengths of Clouds
Authors:

Nane Kratzke
Abstract: Although cloud computing is in all mouth today it seems that there exist only little evidences in literature that it is more economical effective than classical data center approaches. Due to a performed qualitative analysis on COBIT, TOGAF and ITIL this paper postulates that cloud-based approaches are likely to provide more benefits than disprofits to IT management. Nevertheless one astonishing issue is the not often stressed ex ante cost intransparency of cloud based approaches which is a major implicit problem for IT investment decisions. This paper shows first considerations how to overcome this issue.
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Paper Nr: 34
Title:

A NOVEL JOB SCHEDULING MODEL TO ENHANCE EFFICIENCY AND OVERALL USER FAIRNESS OF CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Wenjuan Li, Xuezeng Pan, Qifei Zhang and Lingdi Ping
Abstract: Job scheduling and resource allocation are the key factors which affect the performance of parallel and distributed systems. This paper first analyzed several common used job scheduling models in large and distributed environment. Since the main purpose of cloud computing is to provide “low-cost” and “on-demand” services, this paper introduced a novel two-level based cloud scheduling model. In our model, job scheduling in the cloud is divided into User Scheduling and Task Scheduling which were designed to implement different scheduling strategies. In the User Scheduling level, it applies the distribution justice theory in the sociology area to achieve the highest average user fairness. While in Task Scheduling level, it applies adaptive strategies to achieve the binding of micro tasks and the virtual machines according to different objectives of tasks. The new model redefined the messaging mechanism between main cloud entities and a new advertising mode was introduced for cloud providers to promote their services. The results of emulation experiments show that compared to traditional algorithms the proposed model can guarantee the user expectations and the relative fairness of the services on the basis of high overall efficiency of cloud systems.
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Paper Nr: 46
Title:

ANALYSIS OF CLOUD COMPUTING IN OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM
Authors:

Fui Fui Wong and Cheng Xiang Tan
Abstract: There is an increasing interest in the use of open source cloud computing infrastructure platform by larger companies, academic researchers, scientists and service providers that can tailor the platform for specific users. The open source cloud computing has joined the mainstream where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings to combine public and private clouds. These tools could let companies to build and customize their own computing clouds to work alongside with more powerful commercial solutions. To understand these issues, this paper outlines an analysis study of open source cloud computing platform using six of the most advanced platforms (Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, Nimbus, abiCloud, openQRM and Xen Cloud Platform) in order to gauge whether its potential opportunities could outweigh their possible drawbacks.
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Paper Nr: 73
Title:

TOWARDS A CROSS PLATFORM CLOUD API - Components for Cloud Federation
Authors:

Dana Petcu, Ciprian Crăciun and Massimiliano Rak
Abstract: Cross platform APIs for cloud computing are emerging due to the need of the application developer to combine the features exposed by different cloud providers and to port the codes from one provider environment to another. Such APIs are allowing nowadays the federation of clouds to an infrastructure level, requiring a certain knowledge of programming the infrastructure. We describe a new approach for a cross platform API that encompass all cloud service levels. We expect that the implementation of this approach will offer a higher degree of portability and vendor independence for Cloud based applications.
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Paper Nr: 99
Title:

HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE - A Cloud-oriented Provisioning Model for Virtual Hosts and Accelerators in Hybrid Computing Environments
Authors:

Thomas Grosser, Gerald Heim, Wolfgang Rosenstiel, Utz Bacher and Einar Lueck
Abstract: State of the art cloud environments lack a model allowing the cloud provider to leverage heterogeneous resources to most efficiently service workloads. In this paper, we argue that it is mandatory to enable cloud providers to leverage heterogeneous resources, especially accelerators, to optimize the workloads that are hosted in accordance with the business model. For that we propose a hybrid provisioning model that builds on top of and integrates into state of the art model-driven provisioning approaches. We explain how this model can be used henceforth to handle the combinatoric explosion of accelerators, fabrics, and libraries and discuss how example workloads benefit from the exploitation of our model.
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Paper Nr: 119
Title:

EVENT PROCESSING IN THE CLOUD ENVIRONMENT WITH WELL DEFINED SEMANTICS
Authors:

Marc Schaaf, Arne Koschel and Stella Gatziu Grivas
Abstract: The paper presents the OM4SPACE project, which aims to provide an integration of active functionality into cloud environments to enable applications to further benefit from the agility of this new environment. In particular, we propose an activity service that incorporates well defined interfaces and the clear semantic of Active Database Management System (Active DBMS) style event processing combined with the concepts of modern Event Driven Architectures and the approach of Complex Event Processing. This gives the potential to provide active functionality across the boundaries of one Cloud and to decouple the usage of active functionality from the concrete cloud provider. In this paper we present our initial prototypic implementation of this activity service.
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Paper Nr: 122
Title:

CLOUD INTERCHANGEABILITY - Redefining Expectations
Authors:

André Monteiro, Joaquim Sousa Pinto, Cláudio Teixeira and Tiago Batista
Abstract: The large growth of the last few years in cloud computing has been overwhelming, either on resources, deployment or complexity. Still, it lacks a sustaining basis such as standard methods and deployment settings to potentiate a full evolution. Interoperability and interchangeability are expected to overcome vendor lock-ins. This paper overviews the problem with a state-of-the-art review and reflects some of the undergoing approaches.
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Paper Nr: 137
Title:

AGENT BASED CLOUD PROVISIONING AND MANAGEMENT - Design and Prototypal Implementation
Authors:

Salvatore Venticinque, Rocco Aversa, Beniamino Di Martino and Dana Petcu
Abstract: When interoperability and portability of applications across heterogeneous Clouds are supported, autonomous services which can automatically manage collection, negotiation and monitoring of Cloud resources represents an added value for users within the sky computing paradigm. We describe here the design and the prototypal implementation of an Agency that can access the computing utility market relative to the state-of-art of Cloud computing, on behalf of the user, to maintain always the best resources configuration that satisfies the application requirements. This system is in charge to provision the collection of Cloud resources, from different providers, that continuously meets the requirements of user’s applications. According to the available offers, it generates a service-level agreement that represents the result of resource negotiation and booking with available providers. The user is able to delegate to the Agency the monitoring of resource utilization, the necessary checks of the agreement fulfillment and eventually re-negotiations.
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Paper Nr: 146
Title:

THE IETF SHOULD CREATE AN INTERCLOUD RFC - The Interfaces in the IETF Cloud Reference Framework should be Standardized
Authors:

Jan Sipke van der Veen and Robert J. Meijer
Abstract: This paper discusses the current state of cloud computing and shows that it is comparable to the state of networks before the internet. Clouds need to be connected more to make it easier for users to switch between providers and at the same time make it easier for providers to supply ”infinite resources”. At the moment the big cloud providers do not feel the need to standardize this intercloud and there is no authorative body that sets the standard. This paper argues that it is necessary for the IETF to take its current effort to create a cloud reference framework one step further and standardize the interfaces between the functions and layers as well.
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Area 2 - Services Science Foundation for Cloud Computing

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 25
Title:

FLEXIBLE CONTROL OF PERFORMANCE AND EXPENSES FOR DATABASE APPLICATIONS IN A CLOUD ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Shoubin Kong, Yuanping Li and Ling Feng
Abstract: IaaS is a popular cloud computing service paradigm based on virtualization technology. In an IaaS cloud environment, the service provider configures VMs with physical computing resources (e.g., CPU and memory) and leases them to IaaS customers to run their applications. The customers pay for the resources they use. Such a pay-as-you-go charging mode brings about a few critical concerns about the expenses paid and the performance received. From the standpoint of cloud customers, such concerns as minimizing the expenses while ensuring the performance, optimizing the performance within the budget limit, compromising the expenses and performance, or balancing performance of applications running on different VMs, etc. thus arise. For the IaaS provider, how to reasonably configure VMs so as to meet various requirements from different customers becomes a challenge, whose solution influences the acceptance of IaaS in the future. In this paper, we address this problem and present a weighted multiple objective optimization approach for flexible control of expenses and performance in an IaaS cloud environment. We focus on database applications, consisting of various queries to be executed on different VMs. A genetic algorithm is implemented based on a fine-grained charging model, as well as a normalized performance model. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, using TPC-H queries and PostgreSQL database in a simulated cloud environment.
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Paper Nr: 40
Title:

EMERGENCE OF PUBLIC SECTOR CLOUD COMPUTING - Network Structuration and Data Mingration Implications of Innovative, Public-private Sector IT Partnerships in Information and Service Economies
Authors:

Anastasis D. Petrou
Abstract: Public sector organisations are partnering-up with private sector service providers to migrate IT business services, strategies and operations to a cloud computing framework. Emergence of public sector computing is motivated by desires to save money, to improve efficiency and productivity and to offer better user-centred services in an information and services economy. Such emergence, however, involves more than just a change from one type of IT to another; it involves a migration of data and services and a rationalisation of data centres and re-conceptualisation of policies, among other things. Furthermore, for migrations to succeed, particularly for complex and large organisations, effective, public-private IT partnerships are required between public organisations and private service providers. The paper examines four public sector cloud computing case studies and analyses practical lessons in terms of Network Strurcturation Theory (NST). The analytical unit in NST is network structuration with a particular attention given herein to consideration of perspectives, challenges and conflicts driving network technology design and use over time. Future research implications for public sector cloud computing and a longitudinal study about public-private sector IT partnerships are discussed.
Paper Nr: 53
Title:

DECENTRALISED ORCHESTRATION OF SERVICE-ORIENTED SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOWS
Authors:

Adam Barker and Rajkumar Buyya
Abstract: Service-oriented workflows in the scientific domain are commonly composed as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), formed from a collection of vertices and directed edges. When orchestrating service-oriented DAGs, intermediate data are typically routed through a single centralised engine, which results in unnecessary data transfer, increasing the execution time of a workflow and causing the engine to become a performance bottleneck. This paper introduces an architecture for deploying and executing a service-oriented DAG-based workflows across a peer-to-peer proxy network. A workflow is divided into a set of vertices, disseminated to a group of proxies and executed without centralised control over a peer-to-peer proxy network. Through a Web services implementation, we demonstrate across PlanetLab that by reducing intermediate data transfer and by sharing the workload between distributed proxies, end-to-end workflows are sped up. Furthermore, our architecture is non-intrusive: Web services owned and maintained by different institutions do not have to be altered prior to execution.
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Paper Nr: 77
Title:

A MULTI-LEVEL ARCHITECTURE FOR COLLECTING AND MANAGING MONITORING INFORMATION IN CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Gregory Katsaros, Georgina Galizo, Roland Kübert, Tinghe Wang, J. Oriol Fitó and Daniel Henriksson
Abstract: While the Cloud computing paradigm is maturing and gaining wide acceptance, topics like Quality of Service assurance and resource monitoring will remain active fields of investigation and research. In this paper, we identify characteristics of the monitoring infrastructure in Cloud environments and we present a new architectural approach. The proposed mechanism is spanning across different levels of the infrastructure, providing monitoring data from the application, virtual and physical infrastructure as well as energy efficiency related parameters. Apart from the collection mechanism, we present a monitoring management and storage framework which lies above the infrastructure layer. By exploiting open source APIs combined with custom components we have come up with a generic yet efficient solution, applicable to public, private and hybrid Cloud scenarios.
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Paper Nr: 81
Title:

INCREASING FLEXIBILITY AND ABSTRACTING COMPLEXITY IN SERVICE-BASED GRID AND CLOUD SOFTWARE
Authors:

Per-Olov Östberg and Erik Elmroth
Abstract: This work addresses service-based software development in Grid and Cloud computing environments, and proposes a methodology for Service-Oriented Architecture design. The approach consists of an architecture design methodology focused on facilitating system flexibility, a service model emphasizing component modularity and customization, and a development tool designed to abstract service development complexity. The approach is intended for use in computational eScience environments and is designed to increase flexibility in system design, development, and deployment, and reduce complexity in system development and administration. To illustrate the approach we present case studies from two recent Grid infrastructure software development projects, and evaluate impact of the development approach and the toolset on the projects.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 8
Title:

SERVICE SCIENCE - Introducing Service Networks Performance Analytics
Authors:

Noel Carroll, Ita Richardson and Eoin Whelan
Abstract: Although services are delivered across dispersed complex service eco-systems, monitoring performance becomes a difficult task. This paper explores a number of areas to support the development of service performance analytics within the discipline of service science. The paper provides a comprehensive account for the need to introduce modelling techniques to address the significant research void and explains how actor network theory (ANT) can be introduced as one of the core theories to examine service operations and performance. ANT sets out to develop an understanding on both how and why networks exist and to understand processes co-creation between human and non-human actors. By examining performance, this paper draws our attention towards the need to formulate methods to examine service network key performance indicators and the need to model service interaction, structure, and behaviour which impact on performance and consequently on service evolution.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

SOCIO-ENGINEERING METHODOLOGY FOR CLOUD COMPUTING ANALYSIS
Authors:

Irit Hadar, Ethan Hadar and Debra J. Danielson
Abstract: Detecting potential cloud computing services is part of business direction and strategic planning of enterprise IT management companies. However, this relative new territory examination requires careful analysis that incorporates both external and internal organization perspectives. The socio-engineering methodology for cloud computing analysis (SEC) employed in this paper is aimed at discovering the potential cloud services that are of interest to the company as a whole. The investigation results were inserted into the company strategic technological evaluation process. The methodology was based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques, incorporating interviews, surveys, questioners and an iterative review process. The results formed the company’s cloud taxonomy, as well as highlighted 4 main players and 18 potential domains of services.
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Paper Nr: 59
Title:

INNOVATION IN MOBILE CLOUDS - Analysis of an Open Telco Application
Authors:

Antero Juntunen, Vesa Suikkola, Yrjo Raivio and Sakari Luukkainen
Abstract: Cloud computing is emerging in several ICT areas, including the mobile services industry. This development is known as mobile cloud computing (MCC). MCC may save mobile energy consumption and be utilized to overcome the fragmentation challenges of application developers, who must take into account various mobile operating systems. This paper introduces a novel mobile-device-independent development approach. Mobile applications will be placed into a cloud and will utilize open application programming interfaces from the telecom infrastructure. This approach, called Open Telco, enables application deployment that is fully based on cloud-computing principles. In this study, we present a business model analysis of an application case called Event Experience, using the Service, Technology, Organization, and Finance (STOF) framework.
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Paper Nr: 121
Title:

SPECIFYING SERVICES USING THE SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE MODELING LANGUAGE (SOAML) - A baseline for Specification of Cloud-based Services
Authors:

Brian Elvesæter, Arne-Jørgen Berre and Andrey Sadovykh
Abstract: The Service oriented architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) is a new specification from the Object Management Group (OMG) that provides support for modelling services. The SoaML specification defines three different approaches to specifying services; simple interfaces, service interfaces and service contracts. In this paper we provide an overview of the SoaML language constructs and discuss the three different ways to specify services. Furthermore, we provide practical modelling guidelines for how the different SoaML service specification approaches can be aligned and used as a baseline for specifying cloud-based services.
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Paper Nr: 157
Title:

ARCHITECTURE FOR COMPLIANCE ANALYSIS OF DISTRIBUTED SERVICE BASED SYSTEMS
Authors:

Jonathan Sinclair, Benoit Hudzia, Maik Lindner, Alan Stewart and Terry Harmer
Abstract: Businesses today are required to comply with a litany of legislation, regulations and standards. However, with an increasing utilisation of the internet for delivering products as services, challenges arise in assessing and maintaining compliance. We propose to define an architecture that attempts to leverage the dynamism of service-based infrastructures in order to process the real-time compliance state of a system.
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Paper Nr: 43
Title:

A WEB-SERVICE BASED APPROACH FOR DEVELOPING INTEGRABLE NOISE MONITORING MODULES
Authors:

Nguyen The Cuong, Abdellah Touhafi, Jelmer Tiete and Kris Steenhaut
Abstract: This paper presents a noise monitoring system based on web service technologies. By using microphones placed in certain locations, the system investigates the level of noise pollution. Sensed data are collected, processed and visualized. One of the advantages of the system is to provide monitoring modules that can be added to user websites when necessary. The objective of these modules is to display noise levels at a specific location in real time. The paper also shows the advantages and capabilities of web services in noise monitoring systems. Web service interfaces are developed to support database access, by which many users can query sound database system at the same time. It is believed that the availability of these modules promotes the participation of urban citizens in the noise monitoring task.
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Paper Nr: 64
Title:

SERVICE NETWORKS PERFORMANCE ANALYTICS - A Literature Review
Authors:

Noel Carroll and Yan Wang
Abstract: The success of developing service networks rely on obtaining a correct understanding of the end-to-end business processes. However, there are major concerns as to the lack of research efforts to examine methods to successfully manage the complexity of service networks. The insufficient communication efforts between business and technical experts results in a dissatisfactory service delivery and the inability to predict and measure the service network performance. This literature survey is initiated with purpose of finding a novel way to represent business processes in service networks and analyses the process performance. Specifically, we discuss the need to conceive tools and techniques to manage the complexity of service networks without jeopardising the performance of service networks and provide an overview of current simulation-based modelling approaches and optimising business processes.
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Paper Nr: 74
Title:

USAGE OF CLOUD SERVICES - A Survey for Consumers in USA, Japan and Finland
Authors:

Kaarina Karppinen, Kaisa Koskela and Timo Koivumäki
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine how commonly cloud services are used by consumers around the world and to discover possible differences in cloud service usage within various countries. An online survey was conducted in three countries (Finland, USA and Japan) with more than 3000 respondents. The results show that almost all respondents have used at least some cloud services but the Japanese use them substantially less than the Americans or the Finns. From the five cloud service categories examined in the survey, webmail services are the most commonly used by 91 percent of the respondents. Out of all cloud service examples in our survey Youtube is the most popular one.
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Paper Nr: 83
Title:

A BUSINESS-FOCUSED IT SERVICE MODEL FOR CLOUD
Authors:

David Miller and Mark Woodman
Abstract: The hitherto limited interpretation of service as deployed in IT value creation and solutions implementation is perhaps a reason why so few IT projects are seen to have successful business outcomes. There are strong indications that the commonly used measures of quality and performance have never been adequate for complex services such as IT. As cloud-based technology changes the business and IT landscape it is important to consider how IT services will evolve and can be managed to become more business-focused. A services-based model for IT is described which has been developed from evidence gathered from business and IT and ideas from other sectors. Validated in the field, it is designed around the high value touch-points between business and IT and uses needs-based and experience-based measures for business alignment and service excellence. It is the first time that services have been identified formally as being necessary for business and IT alignment. This is of critical importance to businesses using cloud-based solutions and consistent with the service science notion of the co-creation of value.
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Paper Nr: 126
Title:

EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS AND IT ARCHITECTURE AND TO DEVELOP A MEASUREMENT MODEL FOR BUSINESS CRITICAL SERVICES
Authors:

Péter Fehér and Zoltán Szabó
Abstract: This research paper summarises the experiences of a research and development project that was aimed to explore the relationship between business and IT architecture and to develop a measurement model for Business Critical Services. The paper presents the main research milestones and results, while summarising the research experiences and challenges. The document includes not only the research results, but also the used methodology and approach. The research, utilising architecture modelling frameworks, elaborated an architecture based structure for services and measurement in a Hungarian Bank. By combining service, process and infrastructure models the KPIs of different architecture levels have been aligned and a systematic and integrated measurement concept was developed.
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Area 3 - Cloud Computing Platforms and Applications

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 51
Title:

MEDICAL IMAGING IN A CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Louis Parsonson, Li Bai, Laurence Bourn, Atif Bajwa and Soeren Grimm
Abstract: In this paper we present a cloud computing environment for medical imaging which deals with the issues of scaling a traditionally single-user solution to a software-as-a-service solution. We will first introduce volume rendering for medical imaging, and the issues with volume rendering of medical images on the cloud. We will then describe our method for accelerating CPU based volume rendering on the cloud and for scaling the system to a software-as-a-service solution.
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Paper Nr: 55
Title:

PERFORMANCE EVALUTION OF NOSQL CLOUD DATABASE IN A TELECOM ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Rasmus Paivarinta and Yrjo Raivio
Abstract: Although the cloud computing paradigm has emerged in several ICT areas, the telecommunication sector is still mainly using dedicated computer units that are located in operators’ own premises. According to the general understanding, cloud technologies still cannot guarantee carrier grade service level. However, the situation is rapidly changing. First of all, the virtualization of computers eases the optimization of computing resources. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers a complete computation platform, where instances can be hosted locally, remotely or in a hybrid fashion. Secondly, NoSQL (Not only SQL) databases are widely used in the internet services, such as Amazon and Google, but they are not yet applied to telecom applications. This paper evaluates, whether cloud technologies can meet the carrier grade requirements. IaaS cloud computing platforms and HBase NoSQL database system are used for benchmarking. The main focus is on the performance measurements utilizing a well known home location register (HLR) benchmark tool. Initial measurements are made in private, public and hybrid clouds, while the main measurements are carried out in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The discussion section evaluates and compares the results with other similar research. Finally, the conclusions and proposals for the next research steps are given.
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Paper Nr: 63
Title:

SLA-BASED PLANNING FOR MULTI-DOMAIN INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE
Authors:

Kuan Lu, Thomas Röblitz, Peter Chronz and Constantinos Kotsokalis
Abstract: This paper discusses the problem of planning resource outsourcing and local configurations for infrastructure services that are subject to Service Level Agreements. The objective of our approach is to minimize implementation and outsourcing costs for reasons of competitiveness, while respecting business policies for profit and risk. We implement a greedy algorithm for outsourcing, using cost and subcontractor reputation as selection criteria; and local resource configurations as a constraint satisfaction problem for acceptable profit and failure risks. Thus, it becomes possible to provide educated price quotes to customers and establish safe electronic contracts automatically. Discarding either local resource provisioning, or outsourcing, models efficiently the specialized cases of infrastructure resellers and isolated infrastructure providers respectively.
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Paper Nr: 69
Title:

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ON-DEMAND SAAS SERVICES
Authors:

Rodrigue Chakode, Blaise Omer Yenke and Jean-François Méhaut
Abstract: With the emerging of cloud computing, offering software as a Service appears to be an opportunity for software vendors. Indeed, using an on-demand model of provisioning service can improve their competitiveness through an invoicing tailored to customer needs. Virtualization has greatly assisted the emerging of on-demand based cloud platforms. Up until now, despite the huge number of projects around cloud platforms such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, less open research activities around SaaS platforms have been carried on. This is the reason why our contribution in this work is to design an open framework that enables the implementation of on-demand SaaS clouds over a high-performance computing cluster. We have first focused on the framework design and from that have proposed an architecture that relies on a virtual infrastructure manager named OpenNebula. OpenNebula permits to deal with virtual machines life-cycle management, and is especially useful on large scale infrastructures such as clusters and grids. The work being a part of an industrial project, we have then considered a case where the cluster is shared among several applications owned by distinct software providers. After studying in a previous work how to implement the sharing of an infrastructure in such a context, we now propose policies and algorithms for scheduling jobs. In order to evaluate the framework, we have evaluated a prototype experimentally simulating various workload scenarios. Results have shown its ability to achieve the expected goals, while being reliable, robust and efficient.
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Paper Nr: 111
Title:

DEDICATED VS. ON-DEMAND INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS IN COMMUNICATIONS-INTENSIVE APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Oleksiy Mazhelis, Pasi Tyrväinen, Tan Kuan Eeik and Jari Hiltunen
Abstract: The deployment of cloud services promises companies a number of benefits, such as faster time to market, improved scalability, lower up-front costs, and lower IT management overhead, among others. However, deploying a cloud-based solution is a complex and often expensive process, which needs to be justified with a systematic analysis of the costs associated with alternative deployment options. This paper introduces a model for assessing the total costs of alternative software deployment options. Relevant cost factors for the model are identified based both on academic and practitioner literature. Assuming virtualized environment, the model employs the concept of a virtual central processing unit (vCPU) to represent a basic system construction block, to which different cost factors are allocated. By listing and aggregating relevant cost factors, the total costs are estimated and can be further used to compare the scenarios of shifting (elements of) software systems to a cloud. The analysis focuses on the case of communication-intensive services, where the network data transfer contributes the most to the overall service cost structure, whereas the contribution of other factors is assumed less significant. The cases of in-house, cloud-based and hybrid infrastructure deployment are compared. The results of the analysis suggest that in communication intensive applications, a single point of service is the most cost-effective, since it benefits from the economy of scale in purchasing communication capacity.
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Paper Nr: 131
Title:

C2GEO - Techniques and Tools for Real-time Data-intensive Geoprocessing in Cloud Computing
Authors:

Hassan A. Karimi and Duangduen Roongpiboonsopit
Abstract: Interest in implementing and deploying many existing and new applications on cloud platforms is continually growing. Of these, geospatial applications, whose operations are based on geospatial data and computation, are of particular interest because they typically involve very large geospatial data layers and specialized and complex computations. In general, problems in many geospatial applications, especially those with real-time response, are compute- and/or data-intensive, which is the reason why researchers often resort to high-performance computing platforms for efficient processing. However, compared to existing high-performance computing platforms, such as grids and supercomputers, cloud computing offers new and advanced features that can benefit geospatial problem solving and application implementation and deployment. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm for geospatial data processing on clouds and discuss the results of our experimentation with an existing cloud platform to evaluate its performance for real-time geoprocessing.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 24
Title:

E-HEALTH DRIVERS AND BARRIERS FOR CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION
Authors:

Marco Nalin, Ilaria Baroni and Alberto Sanna
Abstract: Cloud Computing is rapidly changing, or at least reorganizing, the IT domain. Several sectors are already benefitting from this change, others are slower in the adoption. Healthcare sector, and eHealth in particular, could take important advantage from Cloud Computing, but there are limitations that still need to be overcome for a proper adoption. This paper explores the main drivers that could lead eHealth toward Clouds and the main risks and recommendations that should be taken into account.
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Paper Nr: 58
Title:

PROCESSING WIKIPEDIA DUMPS - A Case-study Comparing the XGrid and MapReduce Approaches
Authors:

Dominique Thiébaut, Yang Li, Diana Jaunzeikare, Alexandra Cheng, Ellysha Raelen Recto, Gillian Riggs, Xia Ting Zhao, Tonje Stolpestad and Cam Le T. Nguyen
Abstract: We present a simple comparison of the performance of three different cluster platforms: Apple’s XGrid, and Hadoop the open-source version of Google’s MapReduce as the total execution time taken by each to parse a 27-GByte XML dump of the English Wikipedia. A local hadoop cluster of Linux workstation, as well as an Elastic MapReduce cluster rented from Amazon are used. We show that for this specific workload, XGrid yields the fastest execution time, with the local Hadoop cluster a close second. The overhead of fetching data from Amazon’s Simple Storage System (S3), along with the inability to skip the reduce, sort, and merge phases on Amazon penalizes this platform targeted for much larger data sets.
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Paper Nr: 65
Title:

A CLOUD PLATFORM FOR REAL-TIME INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Andreas Menychtas, Dimosthenis Kyriazis, Spyridon Gogouvitis, Karsten Oberle, Thomas Voith, Georgina Galizo, Sören Berger, Eduardo Oliveros and Michael Boniface
Abstract: Cloud Computing is considered nowadays as the future of ICT systems leveraging new methodologies for developing, providing and consuming services. Even though many people believe that “Cloud” is just another buzzword for utility computing, this new computing paradigm is not only changing the design of modern computing platforms in technical level, but it also impels, from the market perspective, the creation of new value chains and business models. Beyond the great advantages of cloud technologies for scalability, elasticity and low operational cost, there are still many technical complexities and limitations on provisioning and management of applications with high QoS demands that disallow the wide adoption of cloud solutions. In this paper we present a novel cloud platform capable to support real-time interactive applications considering their full lifecycle including service engineering, SLA negotiation, provisioning and monitoring. This platform has been designed and implemented consolidating management and control of the infrastructure and services at all points in the value chain to support real-time interaction focusing on its business and commercial orientation.
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Paper Nr: 67
Title:

KANGAROO: A DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM FOR SNA - Social Network Analysis in Huge-Scale Networks
Authors:

Wu Bin, Dong Yuxiao, Qin Lei, Ke Qing and Wang Bai
Abstract: Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, computers and other information or knowledge entities. The continued exponential growth in the scale of social networks is giving birth to a new challenge to social network analysis. The scale of these graphs, in some cases, is millions of nodes and billions of edges. In this paper, we present a distributed system, KANGAROO, for huge scale social network based on two main computing models which are for finding common neighbour and maximal clique. KANGAROO is implemented on the top of the Hadoop platform, the open source version of MapReduce. This system implements most algorithms of social network analysis, including basic statistics, community detection, link prediction and network evolution etc. based on the MapReduce computing framework. More than anything else, KANGAROO is applied to a real-world huge scale social network. The application scenarios, including degree distribution, linear projection algorithm for community detection and community visualization of presentation layer, demonstrate KANGAROO is efficient, scalable and effective.
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Paper Nr: 82
Title:

AN EFFICIENT GOOGLE DATASTORE ADAPTER FOR RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Johan Selänniemi and Ivan Porres
Abstract: In this article we present the design of a database adapter for the Google Datastore and the Vaadin Rich Internet Application Framework. The adapter allows us to develop Vaadin applications that can use different database systems and can be deployed in a private infrastructure as well as in the Google App Engine platform. The adapter uses a two-level cache schema to improve performance and reduce operation costs. Experimental results show that the use of the adapter does not hinder the ability of the Google App Engine platform to scale web applications on-demand to high loads.
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Paper Nr: 84
Title:

COMMUNITY CLOUD - Cloud Computing for the Community
Authors:

Marte K. Skadsem, Randi Karlsen, Gordon Blair and Keith Mitchell
Abstract: Commercial clouds have gained a lot of popularity because of easy access to high quality services. Private clouds and community clouds have emerged as an answer to the security concerns raised by commercial clouds. A community cloud is build up by resources made available by the community members and provides services adapted to the needs of the community. In this paper we present a community cloud design that focus on the properties of the social bindings within a community and look at how the characteristics of a community can effect the cloud.
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Paper Nr: 103
Title:

THE CLOUD@HOME ARCHITECTURE - Building a Cloud Infrastructure from Volunteered Resources
Authors:

Antonio Cuomo, Giuseppe Di Modica, Salvatore Distefano, Massimiliano Rak and Alessio Vecchio
Abstract: Ideas coming from volunteer computing can be borrowed and incorporated into the Cloud computing model. The result is a volunteer Cloud where the infrastructure is obtained by merging heterogeneous resources offered by different domains and/or providers such as other Clouds, Grid farms, clusters, and datacenters, till single desktops. This new paradigm maintains the benefits of Cloud computing (such as service oriented interfaces, dynamic service provisioning, guaranteed QoS) as well as those of volunteer computing (such as usage of idle resources and reduced costs of operation). This paper describes the architecture of Cloud@Home, a system that mixes both worlds by providing mechanisms for aggregating, enrolling, and managing the resources, and that takes into account SLA and QoS requirements.
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Paper Nr: 104
Title:

ELASTICITY THANKS TO KERRIGHED SSI AND XTREEMFS - Elastic Computing and Storage Infrastructure using Kerrighed SSI and XtreemFS
Authors:

Alexandre Lissy, Stéphane Laurière and Julien Hadba
Abstract: One of the major feature of Cloud Computing is its elasticity, thus allowing one to have a moving infrastructure at a lower cost. Achieving this elasticity is the job of the cloud provider, whether it is IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. On the other hand, Single System Image has a hotplug capability. It allows to “transparently” dispatch, from a user perspective, the workload on the whole cluster. In this paper, we study whether and how we could build a Cloud infrastructure, leveraging tools from the SSI field. Our goal is to provide, thanks to Kerrighed for the computing power aggregation and unified system view, some IaaS and to exploit XtreemFS capabilities to provide performant and resilient storage for the associated Cloud infrastructure.
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Paper Nr: 108
Title:

SHARING SECURE DOCUMENTS IN THE CLOUD - A Secure Layer for Google Docs
Authors:

Lilian Adkinson-Orellana, Daniel A. Rodríguez-Silva, Francisco J. González-Castaño and David González-Martínez
Abstract: With the advent of Web 2.0, end users generate and share more and more content. One of the most representative services in this context is the collaborative edition of online documents. This service is commonly provided through Cloud Computing as Software as a Service. However, the Cloud paradigm still requires users to place their trust in Cloud providers with regard to privacy. This is the case of Google Docs, a very popular service without privacy support for the documents stored on its servers. In this paper we present and discuss a secure layer to guarantee privacy of shared Google Docs documents. To our knowledge, this is one of the first approaches to private shared edition with real Cloud tools.
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Paper Nr: 110
Title:

TOWARDS FOURTH-PARTY LOGISTICS PROVIDERS - A Business Model for Cloud-based Autonomous Logistics
Authors:

A. Schuldt, K. A. Hribernik, J. D. Gehrke, K.-D. Thoben and O. Herzog
Abstract: Cloud computing denotes a paradigm shift in computing that enables a flexible allocation of hardware and software resources on demand. Therewith, it is particularly appealing for applications with a high degree of computational complexity and dynamics. This paper identifies logistics planning and control as a promising application for clouds. However, two prerequisites must be met for cloud-based logistics control. Firstly, the platform-as-a-service layer must provide a synchronisation of the physically distributed real-world material flows and the data flows in the cloud. Secondly, appropriate and scalable control software must be implemented on the software-as-a-service layer. Apart from outlining the technical foundations, this paper describes how both steps enable a business model that is usually referred to as fourth-party logistics.
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Paper Nr: 113
Title:

MEASURING THE USAGE OF SAAS APPLICATIONS BASED ON UTILIZED FEATURES
Authors:

Ali Bou Nassif and Hanan Lutfiyya
Abstract: Software as a Service (SaaS) is an online delivery of software to customers as a service. The interest in adopting SaaS has been rapidly increasing due to the advantages of SaaS. Current SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com charge their customers based on the type of the edition and on the number of users. Many customers are not satisfied with the current pricing model and are requesting to pay according to the actual usage of the SaaS application. SaaS vendors are looking to implement a metering solution that measures the computational resources such as the CPU, memory and transactional usage as well as the utilized features of each SaaS user. This paper focuses on implementing a crucial element of the metering system which is measuring the SaaS applications based on the features utilized by each user. This is also called the Feature-Based Approach.
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Paper Nr: 114
Title:

SECURING FILE STORAGE IN AN UNTRUSTED SERVER - Using a Minimal Trusted Computing Base
Authors:

Somya D. Mohanty and Mahalingam Ramkumar
Abstract: In applications such as remote file storage systems, an essential component of cloud computing systems, users are required to rely on untrustworthy servers. We outline an approach to secure such file storage systems by relying only on a resource limited trusted module available at the server, and more specifically, without the need to trust any component of the server or its operator(s). The proposed approach to realize a trusted file storage system (TFSS) addresses some shortcomings of a prior effort (Sarmenta et al., 2006) which employs a merkle hash tree to guarantee freshness. We argue that the shortcomings stem the inability to verify nonexistence. The TFSS described in this paper relies on index ordered merkle trees (IOMT) to gain the ability to verify non-existence.
Paper Nr: 123
Title:

DESIGNING AND DELIVERING PUBLIC SERVICES ON THE CLOUD

Authors:

Yehia Taher, Rafiqul Haque, Dinh Khoa Nguyen and Willem-Jan van den Heuvel
Abstract: Cost and complexity are currently the most substantial obstacles for designing and delivering services in the public sector. The traditional in-house development and maintenance landscape of public services require experts from diverse domains, various technologies and complex on-premise infrastructure, etc. The high upfront cost and complexity impede the proliferation of Information Technology (IT) within the domain of public sector. It is the aim of this research project to deliver a cloud based platform that allows non IT-experts to customize prefabricated and reusable public services by parameterizing them. This customization revolves around reference guidelines that accommodate a methodology in a consistent manner.
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Paper Nr: 129
Title:

A CLOUD ARCHITECTURE FOR BIOINFORMATICS WORKFLOWS
Authors:

Hugo Saldanha, Edward Ribeiro, Maristela Holanda, Aleteia Araujo, Genaina Rodrigues, Maria Emilia Walter, João Carlos Setubal and Alberto Dávila
Abstract: Cloud computing has emerged as a promising platform for large scale data intensive scientific research, i.e., processing tasks that use hundreds of hours of CPU time and petabytes of data storage. Despite being object of current research, efforts are mainly based on MapReduce in order to have processing performed in clouds. This article describes the BioNimbus project, which aims to define an architecture and to create a framework for easy and flexible integration and support for distributed execution of bioinformatics tools in a cloud environment, not only tied to the MapReduce paradigm. As a result, we leverage cloud elasticity, fault tolerance and, at the same time, significantly improve the storage capacity and execution time of bioinformatics tasks, mainly of large scale genome sequencing projects.
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Paper Nr: 130
Title:

APPLICATION PORTABILITY FOR PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CLOUDS
Authors:

Manohar Jonnalagedda, Michael C. Jaeger, Uwe Hohenstein and Gerald Kaefer
Abstract: With cloud computing, the general idea is to deploy applications and services in the cloud, at some cloud provider’s facilities. But as with traditional software applications, business demands still exist including legal, privacy, cost and technical issues. These demands can prohibit the deployment of the entire software in a cloud provider space. Thus, some cases demand for a hybrid deployment where the application is split into one part that resides on premises and into another part that is deployed to the cloud provider facilities. Nevertheless, individual components could be suitable for a deployment in the cloud. Thus, an important characteristic for cloud computing is portability of components: software should be ready for being deployed on-premises, in a provider cloud or in a hybrid (mixed) setup. The goal is to provide flexibility to this regard for leveraging the advantages of cloud computing. This paper introduces design considerations for developing a hybrid application, in terms of software architecture, communication and security between modules. We give recent trends and recommendations on how to solve these issues so as to achieve portability of the components.
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Paper Nr: 150
Title:

TOWARDS THE NEXT GENERATION OF MODEL DRIVEN CLOUD PLATFORMS
Authors:

Javier Esparza-Peidro and Francesc D. Muñoz-Escoí
Abstract: Current cloud platforms are based on two mainstream models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Both approaches entail strenghts and weaknesses that we collect and present in this paper and we conclude the need to devise a new approach, based on graphical models, to overcome the imposed limitations. This model driven approach is introduced and slightly described, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive scalable modeling language and uncovering new research lines for designing self-manageable cloud platforms.
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Paper Nr: 154
Title:

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE PROCESSES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE DYNAMICS OF INFORMATION DIFFUSION ON THE WEB
Authors:

Leonardo Caporarello and Luca Ongaro
Abstract: The so-called Social Web produced a paradigm shift toward a distributed model of information production and diffusion, as well as an exponential growth of the total amount of information circulating in digital format. The environment in which this information diffuses is a distributed global network of individuals and organizations acting at the same time as information producers and consumers. The emergent dynamics of self-organisation of this network fall into the realm of collective intelligence, and their study is essential in order to understand their influence on the pattern of information diffusion and cultural development.
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Paper Nr: 29
Title:

ON THE ECONOMICS OF HUGE REQUIREMENTS OF THE MASS STORAGE - A Case Study of the AGATA Project
Authors:

Víctor Méndez Muñoz, Mohammed Kaci, Andrés Gadea and José Salt
Abstract: The AGATA is a shell detector for gamma-ray spectroscopy. At the present stage of the project the AGATA collaboration is running an AGATA-demonstrator, which is a small part (only 12 Germanium crystals) of the future full AGATA spectrometer (180 crystals). The AGATA-demonstrator is producing a huge amount of raw-data with a high throughput. This paper focuses on the economics study regarding various options of data storage for the AGATA spectrometer. We discuss the raw-data storage requirements on the demonstrator and the forecasted storage size requirements for the full AGATA spectrometer. We also analyze the data communication requirements. The case study focuses in costs analysis of three options: a dedicated storage, a Grid storage and a Cloud storage service. In this manner, we explain how a huge size mass storage can be affordable, and why the costs savings depends more in the particularity of the problems than in general estimations. The results show a lower total costs for the Grid option.
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Paper Nr: 71
Title:

IMPLEMENTATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF RDF QUERY USING HADOOP
Authors:

YanWen Chen, Fabrice Huet and YiXiang Chen
Abstract: With the prevalence of semantic web, a great deal of RDF data is created and has reached to tens of petabytes, which attracts people to pay more attention to processing data with high performance. In recent years, Hadoop, building on MapReduce framework, provides us a good way to process massive data in parallel. In this paper, we focus on using Hadoop to query RDF data from large data repositories. First, we proposed a prototype to process a SPARQL query. Then, we represented several ways to optimize our solution. Result shows that a better performance has been achieved, almost 70% improvement due to the optimization.
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Paper Nr: 72
Title:

SAURIDA: CLOUD COMPUTING BASED - Data Mining System in Telecommunication Industry
Authors:

Qing Ke, Bin Wu, Yuxiao Dong and Lei Qin
Abstract: Telecommunication data mining has been often used as a background application to motivate many technical problems in data mining research. However, traditional mining algorithms face new challenges which are tremendous amount of data and high time and space complexity of algorithms. Recently, Map-Reduce parallel computing model has been emerging. In this paper, we combine data mining with Map-Reduce based cloud computing to meet the challenges and showcase our applied system named Saurida. As a full functionality system, we provide data flow oriented preprocessing utilities which achieve almost linear speedup and extensively support for user defined functions, and we also provide many data mining algorithms. More importantly, we elaborate several application scenarios as real-word requirements of telecom industry by employing a large volume of data obtained from telecom operator. And we validate our system has a good scalability, effectiveness and efficiency.
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Paper Nr: 96
Title:

AUXILIARY STORAGE AND DYNAMIC CONFIGURATION FOR OPEN CLOUD STORAGE
Authors:

Jincai Chen, Yangfeng Huang, Minghui Lai and Ping Lu
Abstract: Along with the rapid development of cloud computing, cloud storage is also gradually warming. More and more users and corporations are planning to use cloud storage services. At present, however, cloud storage service technology is still facing many problems. Firstly, the current cloud storage systems only belong to some specific cloud storage services providers and are enclosed to other cloud storage services providers. Secondly, the growth of network transmission speed is relatively slow, which is difficult to transfer large amounts of data in a given time. Finally, the current underlying storage architecture of cloud storage can not be dynamically configured as required. For this reason, this paper presents an open architecture model of cloud storage, which allows users to choose suitable cloud storage providers through the two-tier proxy. The system can effectively reduce the response time of the users’ requests through using the geographic distribution auxiliary storage nodes to store hotspot data. The underlying storage architecture of data storage centers can simultaneously adopt the Master-Slave architecture and the P2P architecture, which can hence own the advantages of both two architectures.
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Paper Nr: 160
Title:

METERING THE CLOUD PROVIDERS
Authors:

Fahad Abdel Kader
Abstract: Cloud computing has recently emerged as a modified computing platform, which offers a variety of services for different level of users. At the moment, such services are offered at very low prices, but as the concept of cloud computing will find more adopters, a real market will emerge. At that point in time it will be critical for the customers to verify the bills that they receive from their cloud provider. Therefore, there is a need to not only verify the correctness of the bill but also that the whole process should be real time and automated. An automated cloud metering solution is presented in this paper. The idea is to design a meter which monitors the respective activities as defined in the terms of SLA and generates a bill accordingly. This generated bill will then be automatically compared with the cloud provider’s bill for any errors. This position paper describes the architectural design of the cloud meter and functioning of the automated meter, and then concludes with the information about the future work.
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Paper Nr: 166
Title:

COGNITIVE AND PHYSICAL TRAINING MEDICAL RECORD, A WEB SERVICE BASED ARCHITECTURE
Authors:

E. I. Konstantinidis, A. Billis and P. D. Bamidis
Abstract: Organizing, tracking, monitoring, and acting upon personal health and especially cognitive and physical training information has nowadays become a necessary and important procedure. This is true particularly for special groups of people with cognitive or physical impairments (or both). Elderly people with mild cognitive impairments, autistic children and other categories of people with impairments may obtain benefits by having their daily cognitive and physical activity been monitored. This piece of work, proposes an approach towards a solution for a physical and cognitive medical record held upon the cloud, and accessed through web services. In this way, various semantically described exercises and training platforms may exchange information with the record system and access user performance results obtained in the context of a standardized description of exercises with suitably associated results and scores.
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Area 4 - Cloud Computing Enabling Technology

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 75
Title:

CULTIVATING CLOUD COMPUTING - A Performance Evaluation of Virtual Image Propagation & I/O Paravirtualization
Authors:

Django Armstrong and Karim Djemame
Abstract: Cloud Computing continues to be a rapidly evolving and prevalent paradigm where Quality of Service has a pivotal role to play in guaranteeing performance and provisioning of resources on-demand in a timely fashion. Improvements to the performance of Cloud technology ensure provider profitability and an increased number of applications that can make use of a Cloud where overheads would have otherwise limited usage. This paper presents the results of a quantitative evaluation into the performance overheads of propagating Virtual Machine images to physical resources, at the Infrastructure as a Service layer and then accessing the images, via a Hypervisor’s virtual block I/O device. Two Virtual Infrastructure Managers are evaluated: Nimbus and OpenNebula, along side two Virtual Machine Managers: XEN and KVM. Benchmark results demonstrate Nimbus out of the box outperforming OpenNebula and the performance of XEN exceeding KVM in a greater number of benchmark tests. Conclusions are drawn from the results on the suitability of these technologies for data intensive applications and applications requiring highly dynamic resource sets, where making an uninformed decision on what technology to use could prevent an application reaching its full potential.
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Paper Nr: 78
Title:

DYNAMIC RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND ACTIVE PREDICTIVE MODELS FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS
Authors:

M. Al Ghamdi, A. P. Chester, L. He and S. A. Jarvis
Abstract: This work is concerned with dynamic resource allocation for multi-tiered, cluster-based web hosting environments. Dynamic resource allocation is reactive, that is, when overloading occurs in one resource pool, servers are moved from another (quieter) pool to meet this demand. Switching servers comes with some overhead, so it is important to weigh up the costs of the switch against possible system gains. In this paper we combine the reactive behaviour of two well known switching policies – the Proportional Switching Policy (PSP) and the Bottleneck Aware Switching Policy (BSP) – with the proactive properties of several workload forecasting models. Seven forecasting models are used, including Last Observation, Simple Algorithm, Sample Moving Average, Exponential Moving Algorithm, Low Pass Filter and Autoregressive Moving Average. As each of the forecasting schemes has its own bias, we also develop three meta-forecasting algorithms (the Active Window Model, the Voting Model and the Selective Model) to ensure consistent and improved results. We show that request servicing capability can be improved by as much as 40% when the right combination of dynamic server switching and workload forecasting are used. As important is that we can generate consistently improved results, even when we apply this scheme to real-world, highly-variable workload traces from several sources.
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Paper Nr: 80
Title:

EVALUATING AND MODELING VIRTUALIZATION PERFORMANCE OVERHEAD FOR CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Nikolaus Huber, Marcel von Quast, Michael Hauck and Samuel Kounev
Abstract: Due to trends like Cloud Computing and Green IT, virtualization technologies are gaining increasing importance. They promise energy and cost savings by sharing physical resources, thus making resource usage more efficient. However, resource sharing and other factors have direct effects on system performance, which are not yet well-understood. Hence, performance prediction and performance management of services deployed in virtualized environments like public and private Clouds is a challenging task. Because of the large variety of virtualization solutions, a generic approach to predict the performance overhead of services running on virtualization platforms is highly desirable. In this paper, we present experimental results on two popular state-of-the-art virtualization platforms, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and VMware ESX 4.0, as representatives of the two major hypervisor architectures. Based on these results, we propose a basic, generic performance prediction model for the two different types of hypervisor architectures. The target is to predict the performance overhead for executing services on virtualized platforms.
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Paper Nr: 100
Title:

HANDLING DATA SKEW IN MAPREDUCE
Authors:

Benjamin Gufler, Nikolaus Augsten, Angelika Reiser and Alfons Kemper
Abstract: MapReduce systems have become popular for processing large data sets and are increasingly being used in e-science applications. In contrast to simple application scenarios like word count, e-science applications involve complex computations which pose new challenges to MapReduce systems. In particular, (a) the runtime complexity of the reducer task is typically high, and (b) scientific data is often skewed. This leads to highly varying execution times for the reducers. Varying execution times result in low resource utilisation and high overall execution time since the next MapReduce cycle can only start after all reducers are done. In this paper we address the problem of efficiently processing MapReduce jobs with complex reducer tasks over skewed data. We define a new cost model that takes into account non-linear reducer tasks and we provide an algorithm to estimate the cost in a distributed environment. We propose two load balancing approaches, fine partitioning and dynamic fragmentation, that are based on our cost model and can deal with both skewed data and complex reduce tasks. Fine partitioning produces a fixed number of data partitions, dynamic fragmentation dynamically splits large partitions into smaller portions and replicates data if necessary. Our approaches can be seamlessly integrated into existing MapReduce systems like Hadoop. We empirically evaluate our solution on both synthetic data and real data from an e-science application.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 6
Title:

SUSTAINABILITY OF HADOOP CLUSTERS
Authors:

Luis Bautista and Alain April
Abstract: Hadoop is a set of utilities and frameworks for the development and storage of distributed applications in cloud computing, the core component of which is the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). NameNode is a key element of its architecture, and also its “single point of failure”. To address this issue, we propose a replication mechanism that will protect the NameNode data in case of failure. The proposed solution involves two distinct components: the creation of a BackupNode cluster that will use a leader election function to replace the NameNode, and a mechanism to replicate and synchronize the file system namespace that is used as a recovery point.
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Paper Nr: 33
Title:

ENCRYPTED DOMAIN PROCESSING FOR CLOUD PRIVACY - Concept and Practical Experience
Authors:

D. A. Rodríguez-Silva, F. J. González-Castaño, L. Adkinson-Orellana, A. Fernández-Cordeiro, J. R. Troncoso-Pastoriza and D. González-Martínez
Abstract: Cloud security comprises access control and end-to-end security based on flow or message-level privacy. In some applications, in which all processing takes place at the client side and the Cloud simply handles data storage (e.g. Google Docs), on-line data encryption/decryption guarantees privacy. However, when a service requires server processing (e.g. spreadsheets), privacy must necessarily rely on a dependable entity according to local regulations. Summing up, full Cloud privacy has not been achieved so far. In this paper we take a step towards that goal. We propose executing server side operations in the encrypted domain, so that both the operands and the results are opaque to the server, yet clear to the user. We evaluate this concept with a real Google Apps implementation of basic arithmetic operations.
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Paper Nr: 35
Title:

BOTCLOUDS - The Future of Cloud-based Botnets?
Authors:

Kassidy Clark, Martijn Warnier and Frances M. T. Brazier
Abstract: Many Cloud Service Providers (CSP) offer access to scalable, reliable computing resources following a pay-as-you-go model. Research into security of the Cloud focusses mainly on protecting legitimate users of Cloud services from attacks by external, malicious users. Little attention is given to prohibit malicious users from using the Cloud to launch attacks, such as those currently done by botnets. These attacks include launching a DDoS attack, sending spam and perpetrating click fraud. This paper discusses the threat of Cloud-based botnets, or botclouds and the need for new techniques to detect them. Two experiments show how simple and cheaply these attacks can be launched from botclouds.
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Paper Nr: 42
Title:

ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN CLOUD COMPUTING
Authors:

Daniel Slamanig and Stefan Rass
Abstract: Cloud computing is an evolving paradigm that is believed to play a key-role in future information processing. It is reasonable to expect a cloud computing environment equipped with security systems, but anything not covered by standard measures such as firewalls or encrypted channels is subject to mere trust in the cloud provider. The acceptance of cloud computing might be higher if less trust in the infrastructure is demanded, thanks to a more comprehensive employment of cryptography for security and privacy. Despite a vast amount of cryptographic primitives available today, their full power still remains to be exploited for numerous aspects in cloud computing. The goal of this paper is drawing attention to various primitives in cryptography that might become or actually are already considered to be useful in a cloud computing environment, but have not received as much attention as they deserve from experts in this area.
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Paper Nr: 49
Title:

FLEXIBLE ADVANCE-RESERVATION (FAR) FOR CLOUDS
Authors:

José Luis Lucas, Carmen Carrión and Blanca Caminero
Abstract: Cloud computing has gained popularity in recent times. Nowadays several companies are migrating their software towards cloud providers. Using virtual machines as a resource provisioning mechanism offers some benefits, but depending on the applications it could be difficult to preview the exact amount of resources the company needs to provide QoS to its clients. In this paper, a new way of booking resources is proposed, in which Cloud users can specify the minimum and maximum number of virtual resources needed, so that coping with periods of peak load is easier and cheaper. This is supported by means of a general framework which includes modifications and/or additions of several components at different levels of the Cloud architecture. A microbenchmark-based proof-of-concept evaluation is included, which provides a hint on the benefits of the proposal.
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Paper Nr: 68
Title:

TOWARDS PERFORMANCE PREDICTION FOR CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS BASED ON GOAL-ORIENTED MEASUREMENTS
Authors:

Michael Hauck, Jens Happe and Ralf Reussner
Abstract: Scalability and performance are critical quality attributes of applications developed for the cloud. Many of these applications have to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent users with strongly fluctuating workloads. Existing approaches for software performance evaluation do not address the new challenges that arise for applications executed in cloud computing environments. The effects of virtualization on response times, throughput, and resource utilisation as well as the massive number of resources available require new platform and resource models for software performance evaluation. Modelling cloud environments using established approaches for software performance prediction is a cumbersome task that requires a detailed understanding of virtualization techniques and their effect on software performance. Additional complexity comes from the fact that cloud environments may combine multiple virtualization platforms which differ in implementation and performance properties. In this position paper, we propose an approach to infer performance models of cloud computing environments automatically through goal-oriented measurements. The resulting performance models can be directly combined with established model-driven performance prediction approaches. We outline the research challenges that have to be addressed in order to employ the approach for design-time performance predictions of software systems running in cloud computing environments.
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Paper Nr: 88
Title:

A STATISTICAL APPROACH FOR IDENTIFYING MEMORY LEAKS IN CLOUD APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Vladimir Šor and Satish Narayana Srirama
Abstract: This position paper describes the attempt to automate the statistical approach for memory leak detection in JavaTM applications. Proposed system extends the basic statistical memory leak detection method with further intelligence to pinpoint the source of the memory leak in the source code. As the method adds only small overhead in runtime it is designed to be used in production systems and will help detecting memory leaks in production environments without constraint to the source of the leak. Architecture of the proposed approach is intended to use in cloud applications.
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Paper Nr: 90
Title:

CLOUD MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE IN NGN/NGS CONTEXT - QoS-awareness, Location-awareness and Service Personalization
Authors:

Rachad Nassar and Noёmie Simoni
Abstract: Cloud computing has become one of today’s hot topics. The major contribution of this Internet-based service delivery paradigm consists in offering computing, storage and network resources able to guarantee information technology externalization. In parallel to this novel trend, cloud users requirements are quickly emerging due to both network and service convergence. Therefore, beyond its externalization solution, cloud must also respond to users needs within this “Next Generation Networks/Next Generation Services” (NGN/NGS) context. Hence, it should offer service personalization for cloud users, take into consideration their mobile context, and guarantee an end-to-end QoS. In this paper, we propose a QoS-based cloud management architecture that overcomes the aforementioned challenges through several mechanisms. First, we surpass mobility and E2E QoS challenges by gathering ubiquitous elements into ubiquity-based virtual communities. Second, we ensure service personalization by proposing a seamless and dynamic service composition based on stateless services. Finally we take into consideration user’s ambient context by using location-based virtual communities. Computing models for QoS-aware and location-aware clouds are also provided.
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Paper Nr: 105
Title:

SECURITY IN SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS FOR CLOUD COMPUTING
Authors:

Karin Bernsmed, Martin Gilje Jaatun and Astrid Undheim
Abstract: The Cloud computing paradigm promises reliable services, accessible from anywhere in the world, in an on-demand manner. Insufficient security has been identified as a major obstacle to adopting Cloud services. To deal with the risks associated with outsourcing data and applications to the Cloud, new methods for security assurance are urgently needed. This paper presents a framework for security in Service Level Agreements for Cloud computing. The purpose is twofold; to help potential Cloud customers to identify necessary protection mechanisms and, in the next step, to facilitate automatic service composition based on a set of predefined security requirements. We demonstrate the practical applicability of the first objective with a small case study.
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Paper Nr: 107
Title:

THE IMPACT OF SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ON ITIL PROCESSES
Authors:

Jurriaan Kamer and Harald Vranken
Abstract: Server virtualization influences all aspects of IT service management, and is a key enabling technology for cloud computing. In this paper we focus on the impact of server virtualization on service delivery and service support as described by ITIL. We identify advantages, disadvantages, and risks of server virtualization for capacity, management, availability, costs, and security of IT services, and relate these aspects to the ITIL processes. We validated our results using an empirical test within four different organizations. Our main conclusion is that server virtualization does not change the ITIL processes themselves, but it does change the way the processes are executed. Server virtualization is no silver bullet for solving problems in IT operations and management. If server virtualization has been properly introduced, it can offer faster and better execution of the ITIL processes. The impact is most significant on the Financial Management process, while also Service Level Management, Incident Management, Change Management, IT Service Continuity Management and Availability Management are affected considerably. The impact is less prominent for Application Management, Software Asset Management, Release Management, Configuration Management and Security Management.
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Paper Nr: 158
Title:

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PROVIDING CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY - A Position Paper
Authors:

Ashraf Matrawy, Clifford Liem, Michael Wiener, Yuan Xiang Gu and Andrew Wajs
Abstract: Security issues in cloud computing are ranked high on the list of reasons why many organizations delay considering the computing paradigm for their future plans. There have been numerous discussions about the security problem in cloud computing. In this paper, we take a different stand and discuss the impact that cloud computing will have on offering security. The paper points out the unique aspects of cloud computing architecture and operation and cloud-specific security issues. These cloud-specific issues could have an impact on a number of areas of offering information security. We discuss its impact on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection, organizations extending protection beyond the traditional notion of perimeter defence, and on attack surfaces. We point out how providing security in the new computing paradigm may be affected and that there might be some benefits that the cloud brings to the information security scene. In summary, in this paper, we attempt to initiate discussions around these important issues.
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Paper Nr: 164
Title:

MEASURING I/O PERFORMANCE IN XEN PARAVIRTUALIZATION VIRTUAL MACHINES
Authors:

Giovanni Giacobbi and Tullio Vardanega
Abstract: This report summarizes the results obtained with measurements of I/O performance in Xen paravirtualized machines. Focus was put on the performance differences between storage virtualized on a file system as opposed to directly based on a native partition. The experiments are structured in a repeatable and controlled way. Some important notions are also discussed about hard disks geometry and measurement units.
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Paper Nr: 11
Title:

PROTECTING THE PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES OF VIRTUAL MACHINES IN CLOUD COMPUTING
Authors:

Ethan Hadar
Abstract: Cloud computing is currently focused on providing utility computing, such as storage and computing power, and Software as a Service (SaaS.) However, use of these offerings in an enterprise environment requires security compliance to be enforced on managed servers deployed in the cloud in order to prevent un-authorized administration of deployed images. This requirement may apply to the initial deployment, upgrades, or any physical roaming due to the virtualization of the cloud. This paper presents a conceptual reference architecture, that defines a set of conceptual components that are responsible for intercepting calls, managing administrative commands, controlling roaming and portability, and providing enterprise compliance needs. It inherently supports delegation of the enforcing policies, and consequently it provides a scalable solution.
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