VENUS-C

2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing & Scientific Applications (CCSA2012), 13 May 2012, Ottawa, Canada

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:54:59 GMT

VENUS-C partner, Newcastle University, is presenting at the 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing & Scientific Applications (CCSA 2012) on 13 May in Ottawa. The workshop is held in conjunction with In conjunction with the 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012). The presentation, entitled 'Cloud computing for fast prediction of chemical activity', shines the spotlight on the advances made by Jacek Cala, Hugo Hiden, Paul Watson and Simon Woodman as part of the VENUS-C project.

Feature Stories - SMEs empowered by a pioneering approach to cloud computing

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:06:42 GMT

CORDIS article on how VENUS-C is boosting the competitiveness of small European businesses, published in May 2012

Green, sustainable design is the new watchword among architects. Buildings that save energy and minimise environmental impact are needed around the world, but they are not easy to design - location, geography, climate, cost and many other factors need to be taken into account. A pioneering start-up company is solving the problem thanks to advances in cloud computing developed with EU funding.

UNICORE Summit, 30-31 May 2012, Dresden, Germany

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:46:22 GMT

VENUS-C is presenting its work on cloud standards at the UNICORE Summit in Dresden. Partners from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) are presenting the interoperable execution of eScience applications through open standards, which includes an interoperability demo, in synergy with Shahbaz Memon from the Juelich Supercomputing Centre. This synergy builds on earlier interaction aimed at defining possible extensions to established protocols for job submission developed by the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Euro-Par, 27-31 August 2012, Rhodes, Greece

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:34:33 GMT

Daniele Lezzi, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is presenting at Euro-Par 2012. COMP Superscalar (COMPSs) is a programming framework that provides a programming model and a run-time that eases the development of applications for distributed environments and their execution on a wide range of computational infrastructures. COMPSs has recently been extended in order to be interoperable with several cloud technologies like Amazon, OpenNebula, Emotive and other OCCI compliant offerings. This paper presents the extensions of this interoperability layer to support the execution of COMPSs applications into the Windows Azure Platform. The framework has been evaluated through the porting of a data mining workflow to COMPSs and the execution on an hybrid testbed.

Interoperability in Action - Standards Implementation in VENUS-C

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:13:31 GMT

Interoperability in VENUS-C has focused on easing migration across different target platforms. VENUS-C has three main areas dealing with standards: VM Management (OCCI and OVF), Job Submission (BES) and cloud data storage (CDMI) along with other specifications like the SAGA connector for Azure. The aim of this session is to showcase VENUS-C standards implementation for interoperability, including active contribution to EGI's Federated Cloud Test Bed (CDMI proxy and resource provision), demonstrating the relevance of established OGF protocols in cloud infrastructures and identifying possible extensions to OGF-BES. The session on Tuesday 19 June (9-10:30) includes an interoperability demo and interactive discussions. Session proposers: Daniele Lezzi, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Stephanie Parker, OGF.eeig. Interoperability in VENUS-C at OGF35.

IWSG-Life 2012 - 4th International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences, 23-25 May, Amsterdam,Netherlands

Tue, 15 May 2012 18:02:41 GMT

Peter Borsody, Tamas Kiss, Gabor Terstyanszky, Stephen Winter, Pamela Greenwell and Hans Heindl are presenting "Enhancing a Science Gateway with Windows Azure based Resources for Virtual Screening" at IWSG2012. Running in silico molecular docking simulations is widely utilised by research and industry in a wide area of disciplines. As these simulations require intensive computing power, several distributed computing platforms have already been investigated to support such scenarios. The European VENUS-C project develops and deploys a production quality cloud computing service for research and industry communities. The project has extended the concept of the Azure Generic Worker in order to support the execution of massive scientific experiments. As part of the project, molecular docking applications have been ported and prototyped on Windows Azure based cloud computing resources. This presentation describes the architecture requirements and implementation of molecular docking simulations on the VENUS-C platform. Benchmarks regarding AutoDock Vina and Autodock 4 based docking and virtual screening experiments on Azure resources will be provided. Comparisons between the new cloud solution and existing grid based implementations will also be presented. Finally, the authors investigate how an existing science gateway for molecular docking experiments can be extended with additional cloud resources using the VENUS-C-C platform.

Cloud Computing in Cyprus, 23 May 2012, University of Cyprus

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:48:00 GMT

The University of Cyprus, Microsoft Cyprus and the Cyprus Investment Promotion Agency are hosting a workshop on "Cloud Computing in Cyprus: Opportunities and Challenges". The workshop aims at examining the prospects, the difficulties and the challenges of establishing the regulatory, technological and business environment that could attract to Cyprus significant international activities in the Cloud Computing sector. Nikolas Stylianides, University of Cyprus, is presenting his VENUS-C pilot - IC Cloud: exploiting the VENUS-C platform to provide near real-time diagnosis-aided systems in ICU. Intensive Care Cloud, is based on previous efforts that have led to the design and development of Intensive Care Window, ICW software application. ICW is an open-source solution composed of a middleware framework (medical device bedside controller) and an end-user application. The middleware enables communication with intensive care unit bedside-installed medical devices over standard and proprietary communication protocol stacks. The ICW application facilitates the acquisition of vital signs and physiological parameters exported from patient-attached medical devices and sensors. Moreover, ICW provides run-time and post-analysis procedures for data annotation, data visualisation, data query, and analysis. The ICW application can be deployed as a stand-alone solution or in conjunction with existing clinical information systems providing a holistic solution to inpatient medical condition monitoring, early diagnosis, and prognosis.
VENUS-C is a promising solution for addressing the computational challenges and a scalable on demand solution in regards to data storage, data analysis and data mining.

university of Applied Sciences, Geneva University

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:38:00 GMT

Pilot: ImPrOV - Porting MetaPIGA on VENUS-C platform, led by the University of Applied Sciences and University of Geneva, Switzerland

Nabil Abdennadher received his engineering degree from ENSI (Tunisia) and his PhD from the University of Valenciennes (France). He has been working as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences, West Switzerland (HES-SO) since 2001. His major research interests include distributed computing, Quality of Service in Large-scale Distributed Systems (LSDS) and porting applications on LSDS. He is the lead architect of XtremWeb-CH, a volunteer computing middleware. Nabil Abdennadher is involved in several European and Swiss Grid research projects. He is presently director of the research institute “Institut d’ingénierie informatique et des télécommunications” (inIT) and a member of the Executive Board of the Swiss national Grid association (SwiNG).

Michel C. Milinkovitch received his PhD in evolutionary biology in 1994 after studies at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Human and Molecular Biology, University of Brussels and Yale University, US, later completing a post-doctorate in quantitative genetics. As full professor at the Free University of Brussels, he founded a research laboratory in evolutionary genetics. He joined the University of Geneva in 2008, where he initially focused research on conservation genetics, molecular phylogeny, and genetics applied to biotechnology. He later shifted the bulk of his research group to analytical and experimental aspects of evolutionary developmental genetics.

Marko Niinimaki has an M.A. in Philosophy and Ph.D. in Computer Science. He has written and lectured about operating systems, distributed computing, data bases, programming methods, ontologies and OLAP. He has worked at CERN, various universities, and a private company in Japan. He currently works at the University of Geneva.

Malaga University

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:03:15 GMT

Dr Oswaldo Trelles has a degree in Industrial Engineering from the Catholic University of Peru, a Master Science degree in Computer Sciences by the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain; a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Malaga with a focus on parallel algorithms for biological sequences analysis in supercomputers. He also holds a Master Sciences degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Malaga. Currently he works as Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the University of Malaga, Spain, teaching Fundamentals and Design of Operating Systems and Parallel applications in bioinformatics; in the Computer Sciences faculty. His research focuses on parallel paradigms for distributed and shared memory multiprocessors, many- and multi-core, Grid and Cloud computing in the fields of biological and biomedical data, particularly the “big-data” challenge.

Social media

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:08:06 GMT

Pilot: Cloud4Trends - Leveraging the cloud infrastructure for localized real-time trend detection in social media, led by the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Social media applications have emerged as powerful means of sharing and exchanging information on a wide variety of topics. Detecting topic-specific trends is of significant interest not only to pinpoint emergent or suspicious behaviour in the network but also to analyse societal concerns or even a consensus of collective decision-making. For example, raw information from Twitter has been used in research for predicting the revenue of upcoming films, stock prices, the real-time identification of earthquakes and reactions to political debates, among other topics. Cloud4Trends is a cloud-based framework that provides a viable approach to real-time large-scale data mining applications, which has stemmed from our VENUS-C pilot. The Cloud4Trends framework leverages VENUS-C to help address the challenges posed by data and time-intensive processes like social media assessment.

“Researchers involved in social web mining face the challenge of handling and analysing massive amounts of evolving data with algorithms frequently characterised by high computational complexity. Our aim is to demonstrate the advantages of VENUS-C for analysing web social data in real-time and coping with massive data analysis tasks and processing time. The ultimate goal is to ensure that businesses and policy makers can gain insights into the interests and concerns of local citizens", Athena Vakali, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece