Cameron Kiddle

CFP - Gateway Computing Environments (GCE) 2011

2011-09-14T10:29:00.004-06:00

CALL FOR PAPERS - GCE 2011
*** Extended Submission Deadline - October 3, 2011 ***

Gateway Computing Environments (GCE) 2011
(Workshop at SC 2011)
November 18, 2011
Seattle, Washington

Scientific portals and gateways are important components of many large-scale Grid and Cloud
computing projects. They are characterized by Web-based environments, which include, but are not limited to, user interfaces and services that securely access Grid and Cloud resources, data,
applications, and collaboration environments for communities of scientists. As a result, the scientific portals and gateways provide both a user-centric and a community-centric view (with social networking) of the cyber infrastructure.

Web technologies evolve rapidly, and trends such as Cloud Computing are changing the way many scientific users expect to interact with cyberinfrastructure resources. Academic clouds are being created using open source cloud technologies. Important Web standards such as Open Social, OpenID, and OAuth are changing the way Web portals are built, shared, and secured. It is the goal of the GCE workshop series to provide a venue for researchers to present pioneering, peer-reviewed work on the above discussed and other related topics to the international science gateway community.

Topics of interest include the following:
* Integration of Web 2.0 technologies with science gateways;
* Gateways to cloud computing services;
* Applications of virtual world technologies to science and education gateways;
* Social networks for scientific communities;
* Grid portals and gateways deployments, including User Portals, Application Portals, Science
Gateways, Education Portals, User interface/usability studies;
* Design and architecture of Grid portals, portal containers, and gateways;
* Tools and frameworks that make developing Grid Portals and gateways easier;
* Portal security models and solutions;
* Middleware solutions in support of scientific portals and Gateways including Web Services, workflow and mashup composers and engines, and similar capabilities;
* Non-browser gateways: desktops and mobile computing gateways; and
* Summary and survey papers.

See http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce11/ for additional information.

CFP: The 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid2011) - Submission deadline extended to July 15

2011-05-11T14:48:00.003-06:00

The 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid2011)
Lyon, France
Sep 21 - Sep 23, 2011
http://grid2011.mnm-team.org/
Co-located with the EGI Technical Forum

Sponsored by:
[TBD] The IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing
[TBD] Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture

Grid computing enables the sharing of distributed computing and data
resources such as processing, network bandwidth and storage capacity
to create a cohesive resource environment for executing distributed
applications. The Grid conference series is an annual international
meeting that brings together a community of researchers, developers,
practitioners, and users involved with Grid technology. The objective
of the meeting is to serve as both the premier venue for presenting
foremost research results in the area and as a forum for introducing
and exploring new concepts. The conference will feature invited talks,
workshops, and refereed paper presentations.

Grid 2011 welcomes paper and poster submissions on innovative work
from researchers in academia, industry and government describing
original research work in grid computing. Previous events in this
series have been successful in attracting high quality papers and a
wide international participation. This event will be co-located with
the EGI Technical Forum.

SCOPE

Grid 2011 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Applications, including eScience and eBusiness Applications
- Architectures and Fabrics
- Authentication, Authorization, Auditing and Accounting
- Autonomic and Utility Computing on Global Grids
- Cloud computing
- Cloud, Cluster and Grid Integration
- Creation and Management of Virtual Enterprises and Organizations
- Critical surveys or reflections on the past decade on grid and distributed computing
- Dynamic, Distributed, Data-Intensive Access, Management and Processing
- Energy Efficiency and Grid
- Grid Economy and Business Models
- Infrastructure and Practise of Distributed Computing - Metadata, Ontologies, and Provenance
- Middleware and Toolkits
- Monitoring, Management and Organization Tools
- Networking - Performance Measurement and Modelling
- Problem Solving Environments
- Programming Models, Tools and Environments
- Production Cyberinfrastructure
- QoS and SLA Negotiation
- Resource Management, Scheduling, and Runtime Environments
- Scientific, Industrial and Social Implications
- Semantic Grid
- Standardization efforts in Grid
- Virtualization and grid computing

TECHNICAL PAPERS

Grid 2011 invites authors to submit original papers (not published or
under review elsewhere). Papers should be no more than 8 pages in
length (including diagrams and references) and be submitted as a PDF
file by using the submission system: URL

Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to
register and present the paper. A separate conference proceedings will
be published and will also be a part of the IEEE Xplore and the CS
digital library. For author instructions visit www.grid2011.org.

IMPORTANT DATES

05 May 2011 Technical Paper Submission Open
08 June 2011 Workshop proposal due
15 June 2011 Workshop acceptance notifcation
15 July 2011 Technical Paper Submission Due (Extended)
17 August 2011 Paper Acceptance Notifications
24 August 2011 Full and Revised papers due
15 August 2011 Poster submissions Due
25 August 2011 Poster Acceptance Notifications

CONFERENCE ORGANISATION

General Chair: Nils gentschen Felde, MNM, Munich
Program Chair: Shantenu Jha, Rutgers, USA and Edinburgh, UK
Local Chair: Frederic Suter, IN2P3, Lyon
Workshop Chair & Poster Chair: Gilles Fedak, INRIA, Lyon
Proceedings and Publications Chair: Rajkumar Buyya, The University of
Melbourne and Manjrasoft, Australia

Program Vice Chairs:

Clouds and Virtualisation: Roger Barga, Microsoft Research, US
Distributed Production Cyberinfrastructure and Middleware: Andrew Grimshaw, Univ. of Virginia, US
e-Research and Applications: Daniel S. Katz, Univ. of Chicago and Argonne National Lab, US
Tools & Services, Resource Management & Runtime Environments: Ramin Yahyapour, Dortmund Distributed Data-Intensive Science and Systems: Erwin Laure, KTH, Sweeden

Publicity Chairs: Suraj Pandey, Univ of Melbourne, Australia
Yoshiyuki Watase, KEK, Japan
Cameron Kiddle, Calgary, Canada
Ioan Raicu, Illinois Institute of Technology and Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Adam Barker, St. Andrew's, UK

Program Comittee:

Andreas Aschenbrenner, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Ignacio Blanquer, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
Jim Dowling, SICS, Sweden
Vangelis Floros, GRNET, Greece
Neil Chue Hong, EPCC, UK
Patrick Fuhrmann, DESY, DE
Jens Jensen, STFC, UK
Peter Kunszt, SystemsX, Switzerland
Hideo Matsuda, University of Osaka, Japan
Ioan Raicu, Illinois Institute of Technology and Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Heiko Schuldt, Basel University, Switzerland
Alex Sim, LBL, US
Osamu Tatebe, Tsukuba University, Japan
Domenico Talia, Università della Calabria, Italiy
Erik Elmroth, Umeå University, Sweden
Bastian Koller, HLRS, Germany
Rosa Badia, UPC, Spain
Marco Danelutto, Università di Pisa, Italy
Frederic Desprez, INRIA-LIP, France
Thilo Kielmann, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands
Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo
Alan Sill, Texas-Tech, US
Steven Newhouse, EGI, NL
Eva Deelman, ISI, USC Karolina, US
Sarnowska-Upton, Univ. of Virginia, US
Marty Humphrey, University of Virginia, US
Rob Gillen, Oak Ridge National Laboratory , US
Kate Keahey, Argonne National Laboratory, US
Judy Qiu, Indiana University, US
Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame, US
Jim Myers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US
Tevfik Kosar, University at Buffalo, US
David Abramson, Monash University, Australia
Chaitanya Baru, San Diego Supercomputer Center, US
Jaliya Ekanayake, Microsoft University, US
Miron Livny, Univ. of Wisconsin, US
Ian Foster, Univ. of Chicago, US
Dieter Kranzlmueller, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
Gabrielle Allen, Louisiana State University, USA
David Bader, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Henri Bal, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Eloisa Bentivegna, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Germany
Nicolas Kourtellis, University of South Florida, USA
Patricia Kovatch, University of Tennessee, USA
Manish Parashar, Rutgers, USA
Alistair Rendell, Australian National University, Australia
Richard Sinnott, University of Melbourne, Australia
Alan Sussman, University of Maryland, USA
Mark Stillwell, INRIA-Université de Lyon-LIP, France
David Wallom, Oxford University, UK

Slides from Cybera Summit 2010 Presentation: Collaborative Science: Technologies & Examples

2010-10-18T11:36:00.006-06:00

Presentation I gave at Cybera Summit 2010 in Banff, AB (September 21 - 22, 2010). Discusses different Web 2.0 / social networking technologies that can enable collaborative science and example uses of these technologies as part of collaborative science portals/gateways. Examples include a few projects that the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary is involved in including: GeoChronos, CyberSKA and WaterCloud - all of these projects make use of the Elgg open source social networking platform.

Collaborative Science: Technologies & Examples

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

CFP: GCE 2010 (Gateway Computing Environments) - DEADLINE EXTENDED

2010-09-03T09:17:00.004-06:00

The paper submission deadline for Gateway Computing Environments 2010 has been extended to September 23rd, 2010.

See http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce10 for additional information.

CFP: GCE 2010 (Gateway Computing Environments)

2010-08-19T15:19:00.003-06:00

CALL FOR PAPERS - GCE 2010
***Submission Deadline - September 5, 2010***

Gateway Computing Environments
(Workshop at SC 2010)
November 14, 2010
New Orleans, LA, USA

Scientific portals and gateways are important components of many large-scale Grid and Cloud computing projects. They are characterized by Web-based environments, which include, but are not limited to, user interfaces and services that securely access Grid and Cloud resources, data, applications, and collaboration environments for communities of scientists. As a result, the scientific portals and gateways provide both a user-centric and a community-centric view (with social networking) of the cyber infrastructure.

Web technologies evolve rapidly, and trends such as Cloud Computing are changing the way many scientific users expect to interact with cyberinfrastructure resources. Academic clouds are being created using open source cloud technologies. Important Web standards such as Open Social, OpenID, and OAuth are changing the way Web portals are built, shared, and secured. It is the goal of the GCE workshop series to provide a venue for researchers to present pioneering, peer-reviewed work on the above discussed and other related topics to the international science gateway community.

Topics of interest include the following:
* Integration of Web 2.0 technologies with science gateways;
* Gateways to cloud computing services;
* Applications of virtual world technologies to science and education gateways;
* Social networks for scientific communities;
* Grid portals and gateways deployments, including User Portals, Application Portals, Science Gateways, Education Portals, User interface/usability studies;
* Design and architecture of Grid portals, portal containers, and gateways;
* Tools and frameworks that make developing Grid Portals and gateways easier;
* Portal security models and solutions;
* Middleware solutions in support of scientific portals and Gateways including Web Services, workflow and mashup composers and engines, and similar capabilities;
* Non-browser gateways: desktops and mobile computing gateways; and
* Summary and survey papers.

See http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce10 for additional information.

Slides from GeoChronos Presentation at #bcnet10

2010-05-07T13:40:00.003-06:00

Presentation I gave at BCNET/CANARIE Conference 2010 (May 4-5, 2010) in Vancouver. It gives an overview of GeoChronos - and on-line collaborative portal for earth observation scientists built on social networking and cloud computing technologies. The presentation is primarily composed of a mix of slides from previous GeoChronos presentations that I have given.

Enabling Collaboration Among Earth Observation Scientists with the GeoChronos Portal

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

Slides from "GeoChronos: Challenges and Achievements" presentation at #OGF28

2010-03-15T17:22:00.004-06:00

Presentation I gave at OGF 28 in Munich (Mar. 15-18, 2010). It is about challenges and achievements to date in the GeoChronos project, which is aimed at the development of an on-line collaborative environment for earth observation scientists. The presentation is also available on the OGF site along with other presentations from the same session.

GeoChronos: Challenges and Achievements

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

Cyber-SKA Canada Employment Opportunities

2010-01-05T12:30:00.005-07:00

There are currently several employment opportunities at the University of Calgary (UofC) as part of the Cyber-SKA Canada project that I am Technical Coordinator for. Postings for employment opportunities at University of British Columbia (UBC) and McGill University should also be up soon. The CANARIE funded project will focus on development of cyberinfrastructure to process and analyze data that will be gathered by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). See my previous blog posting for more details on this project.

Links to the UofC job postings are below. The application deadline for all positions is January 15, 2010.

Square Kilometre Array project awarded more than $2 million

2009-12-16T15:23:00.006-07:00

The Grid Research Centre (GRC) will be a participant in the Cyber-SKA Canada project, recently awarded over $2 million dollars as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP2) program. The project, led by Dr. Russ Taylor, head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary, will involve development of cyberinfrastructure to process and analyze data that will be gathered by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA will be the world's largest radio telescope when completed around 2020. For more details on this project see the following media release by the University of Calgary: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~ria/2009/December2009/ska.html

#SC09 Highlights - Thursday Nov. 19th and Friday Nov. 20th

2009-11-20T22:11:00.009-07:00

Another SC has come and gone, and overall I really enjoyed it again this year. It is one of my favorite conferences to attend each year.

In this posting I will provide some highlights for Thursday Nov. 19th and Friday Nov. 20th.
Highlights from previous days of the conference can be found at the below links:

Thursday Nov. 19th, started out with the keynote by Al Gore on climate change. He is a very good speaker. At times he was quite humorous, and at other times he was quite serious. Some quotes from his talk are below:

As much urban habitat will be developed in the next 35 years than has ever been developed.
In the last 100 years the earth's population has quadrupled from 1.6 billion to 6.8 billion.
By beginning of next year there will be 1 billion transistors for each of the 6.8 billion people on earth.
Climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral issue.

After the keynote I attended an exhibitor forum on Virtualization and Cloud Computing and then walked around the exhibit floor some more. At 12:15 I attended the "HPC Saving the Planet, One Ton of CO2 at a Time" BoF. One thing we were told that was worth taking a look at was the Smart 2020 report. After the BoF I went back and finished my tour of the exhibit floor. At 2:15 p.m. I attended the Masterworks session titled "High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook" by Robert Johnson. It was a full session, and I even had to wait for some room to free up after the previous session, before being allowed to go in. Security was quite strict on fire regulations this year. No standing allowed in session rooms, and no sitting against the walls out in the lobby. Robert talked about how Facebook was managing data. A few interesting and impressive statistics about Facebook that he mentioned are as follows:

> 300 million users
200 billion monthly page views
1 billion chat messages per day

After the Facebook Masterworks session I attended a technical paper presentation: "VGrADS: Enabling e-Science Workflows on Grids and Clouds with Fault Tolerance". I then took a break before heading downtown to the Technical Program Reception at the Portland Center for Performing Arts where there was plenty of food and entertainment.

On Friday November 20th, I attended the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) Workshop.
In the afternoon of the workshop I presented a paper co-authored by Roger Curry, myself and Rob Simmonds entitled "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways". The paper describes different approaches for integrating social networking in scientific gateways, and highlights our experiences using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in developing the GeoChronos scientific gateway. Slides for that presentation are available here. Being the afternoon of the last day I had anticipated not many being in attendance. However, there were still about 40 people in the room which I thought was pretty good. Wireless was still running, even though we were told it was going to be cut off at 12:00, so I was able to give a brief live demonstration of GeoChronos at the end of the presentation.

Overall, the day was full of many excellent papers. I was quite interested by several of the papers that were making use of iGoogle and OpenSocial gadgets. There was also an interesting paper on a TeraGrid user portal designed for mobile phones. A list of the papers I found most interesting is below. Slides for these and other papers from the workshop can be found here.

Lan Zhao, Shuang Wu, Rakesh Veeramacheneni, Carol Song and Larry Biehl. "Delivering Real-time Satellite Data to a Broader Audience"
Rion Dooley, Stephen Mock, Praveen Nuthulapati, Patrick Hurley and Maytal Dahan. "Evolving Interfaces to Impacting Technology: The Mobile TeraGrid User Portal"
Wenjun Wu, Thomas Uram and Michael E. Papka. "Web 2.0 Based Social Informatics Data Grid"
Zhenhua Guo, Raminderjeet Singh and Marlon Pierce. "Building the PolarGrid Portal Using Web 2.0 and OpenSocial"

Slides from "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways" presentation at #SC09

2009-11-20T15:42:00.005-07:00

Presentation I gave as part of the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) Workshop at SC09 in Portland on Nov. 20, 2009. Describes different approaches for integrating social networking in scientific gateways, and highlights our experiences using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in developing the GeoChronos scientific gateway. Paper can be found here.

Social Networking and Scientific Gateways

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

#SC09 Highlights - Tuesday Nov. 17th and Wednesday Nov. 18th

2009-11-19T00:14:00.009-07:00

Well, I missed writing a highlights post yesterday, so I will write one for both yesterday and today.

SC09 continues to go great. A lot of excellent papers, posters, keynotes, exhibits, receptions and so forth.

Tuesday Nov. 17th started out with the opening keynote by Intel CTO Justin Rattner. A very good talk on "The Rise of the 3D Internet Advancements in Collaborative and Immersive Sciences". He posed the question "Is the future of HPC the 3D Web" and responded "The future of HPC is the 3D Web". Gave some excellent demos including ScienceSim, OpenSim, cloth simulation, fluid simulation and more. He finished the presentation off on a very high note by demonstrating Teraflop performance on
a single Larrabee chip!

After that I walked around the exhibit floor for a while. I stopped at the Purdue booth (#2473) and watched a HUBzero demonstration by Michael McLennan. HUBzero is a pretty cool collaborative platform for scientists that enables them to share presentations, papers and other materials and to run software/tools on-line. nanoHUB was the first hub created and now has 90,000 users and 5,000,000 hits per month. Hubs for other disciplines have been created since. I have been following this project for quite a while, and they have progressed quite a bit. It has many similarities to the GeoChronos platform that we are developing at the Grid Research Centre. It is definitely worth checking out. The tool they use to enable easy generation of graphical interfaces for applications mad available on-line, called Rappture, has already been made open source. HUBzero is supposed to be released as open source in Spring 2010. Looking forward to this.

In the afternoon I demonstrated GeoChronos at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth (#142). GeoChronos is an on-line collaborative environment for earth observation scientists that leverages social networking, cloud computing and the Semantic Web. Slides used as part of the demonstration are available here.

Went to a technical paper session later in the afternoon that had a couple of papers that I was interested in:

Improving GridFTP Performance Using The Phoebus Session Layer by E. Kissel et. al
On the Design of Scalable, Self-Configuring Virtual Networks by D. I. Wolinsky et. al

After the technical paper session I attended the poster reception. A few posters that caught my interest were:

Automatic Live Job Migration for HPC Fault Tolerance with Virtualization by Y. L. Pan
A Policy Based Data Placement Service by M. A. Amer
Mirroring Earth System Grid Datasets by E. Brady and A. Chervenak

Wrapped up the day by attending the Cray reception at the Hilton hotel downtown.

I got up early on Wednesday November 18th, to attend the SGI breakfast at the Doubletree hotel. Heard talks from the CEO, CTO as well as someone from E-bay and someone from Intel.

Had to catch up with some other work for the rest of the morning pertaining to a Green IT project called GreenStar Network that the Grid Research Centre is a partner on.
CANARIE just announced the $2 million funded project yesterday: http://bit.ly/4FAWmW

Gave another GeoChronos demonstration at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth in the afternoon. Had a good chat with the CEO and CTO of GridCentric, a grid/virtualization startup based out of Toronto.

Walked around the exhibit floor for most of the rest of the afternoon, caught up with some people I had met from previous years. If you are looking for some good swag, try the TLCSquared Booth (#1801). Also attended part of an exhibitor forum and a BoF on NEESgrid.

Wrapped up the day with an excellent reception hosted by Mellanox at the Hilton downtown.
Heard from the CEO of Mellanox, Richard Kaufmann from HP and a researcher from ORNL.
Richard Kaufmann was quite the entertaining speaker. Speakers were followed by an excellent buffet dinner. With all the vendor receptions that happen during SC, I have heard it said "If you are paying for dinner, then you are doing something wrong".

Looking forward for the remaining two days of SC09. Will be giving a presentation entitled "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways" on Friday at 1:30p.m. at the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop. The paper highlights our experiences in using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in developing scientific gateways. Come check it out if you haven't already caught your flight home.

Slides from GeoChronos demonstration at #SC09

2009-11-19T00:03:00.005-07:00

Presentation shown as part of the GeoChronos Demonstration at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth (#142) at SC09 in Portland on Nov. 17th and Nov. 18th, 2009. (Similar to the GeoChronos - CANARIE NEP Showcase Presentation with a few minor revisions.)

GeoChronos - SC09 Demo Presentation

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

#SC09 Highlights - Monday Nov. 16th

2009-11-16T22:45:00.009-07:00

Had a good day at SC09 in Portland today. I jumped between three different workshops that were going on today:

Overall the presentations were pretty good. Each of the workshops had at least one paper centering around the use of Hadoop/MapReduce. Below are the list of papers/presentations that I found to be most interesting:

"Making Infrastructure Invisible" - Dr. Dan Reed, Microsoft Corporate VP for Extreme Computing (MTAGS09 Keynote)
- "Successful technologies are invisible."
- "High value does not imply high utilization. Rapid response is often more important."
"Robust Workflows for Science & Engineering" - David Abramson et. al (MTAGS09 Invited Paper)
- Talked about Nimrod/K, the workflow engine for the Nimrod Toolkit. It is built on Kepler.
"Lessons Learned From a Year's Worth of Benchmarks of Large Data Clouds" - Yunhong Gu and Bob Grossman (MTAGS09 Invited Paper)
- Talked about Sector/Sphere - An open source high performance distributed file system and parallel data processing engine. Performance was shown to be significantly better than Hadoop.
- Demos of Sector/Sphere are being given at the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) Booth (#1309)
"Cloud Computing for Science" - Kate Keahey (Systems Biology Workshop)
- Talked about Nimbus and Science Clouds

In the evening I attended the Opening Gala. Just took a browse around the exhibition floor tonight, so don't have any booth specific comments to add at this time. Will comment on booths/projects I found interesting in future blog posts this week.

Something else that is pretty cool and worth checking out is the Need4Feed site hosted by Purdue University. It is following the #SC09 hashtag on twitter and generating various rankings and statistics.

Tomorrow I will be giving a demonstration of GeoChronos - an on-line collaborative platform for earth observation scientists leveraging social networking, cloud computing and Semantic Web technologies. Come and check it out between 2pm - 3pm at the Compute Canada - CANARIE Booth (#142).

#SC09 demo schedule for the @GeoChronos scientific gateway (Visit booth 142)

2009-11-13T15:12:00.013-07:00

I will be demonstrating the GeoChronos scientific gateway (http://geochronos.org/) at SC09 in Portland. GeoChronos, which is funded as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) program, is an on-line collaborative platform for earth observation scientists that leverages social networking, cloud computing and Semantic Web technologies.

Demonstrations will take place at the Compute Canada - CANARIE booth (#142) at the following times:

Tuesday Nov. 17th: 2pm - 3pm
Wednesday Nov. 18th: 2pm - 3pm

Note that on Friday Nov. 20 at 1:30 p.m. I will be presenting a paper entitled "Social Networking and Scientific Gateways" as part of the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop at SC09. It is a paper co-authored by Roger Curry, myself and Rob Simmonds that compares several approaches for integrating social networking into scientific gateways. It highlights our experience using Facebook, Ning and Elgg in the development of GeoChronos.

CFP: PADS 2010 (Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation)

2009-10-26T08:23:00.004-06:00

CALL FOR PAPERS - PADS 2010
*** Deadline January 8, 2010 ***
24th ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on
Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation
(PADS) 2010
http://www.pads-workshop.org/pads2010.html

May 17-19, 2010,
Atlanta, Georgia, USA

The Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS), formerly called Parallel and Distributed Simulation, is soliciting papers in all aspects of simulation technology, expanding the traditional focus on parallel and distributed simulation methods and applications.

Specifically, the steering and program committees look forward to high-quality paper submissions in the following areas:

* The construction of simulation engines using advanced computer science technology.
* Techniques for constructing scalable simulations.
* Advanced modeling techniques that allow solution of previously difficult or impossible problem domains.
* Simulation visualization techniques.
* Algorithms and methods for parallel or distributed simulation, including synchronization, scheduling, memory management, and load balancing.
* Applications of large--scale or distributed simulation methods.
* Distributed interactive simulation and distributed virtual environments.
* Tools and techniques for interoperability of simulations; emulations of real systems.
* Mechanisms for efficient design of experiments.

Sponsors (approvals pending):
ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation (SIGSIM), IEEE Computer
Society Technical Committee on Simulation (IEEE-TCSIM), and Society
for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS).

Important Dates:
Paper manuscripts must be submitted no later than January 8, 2010. Electronic submission of postscript or PDF is highly encouraged, using the URL given below. Hard copy submissions are allowed, but six copies must be received by the program chair by the deadline. Notification of acceptance will be made by February 19, 2010. Camera ready copies must be submitted by March 23, 2010.

Submissions:

Papers must be unpublished and must not be submitted for publication elsewhere. Each submission must be accompanied by the following information: a short abstract, a complete list of authors and their affiliations, a contact person for correspondence, post and email addresses. Papers must be written in English and should not exceed 10 pages using IEEE Formatting Guidelines (the final versions of accepted papers would be limited to 8 pages, with option to buy additional pages). All submissions will be reviewed using a double-blind review process, i.e., the identity of authors and referees will not be revealed to each other. To ensure blind reviewing, authors' names and affiliations should not appear in the paper, and bibliographic references should be suitably modified.

Selected articles from PADS 2010 will be considered for extension and publication within a Special Issue of SCS Simulation.

General Chairs:
Richard Fujimoto, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
George Riley, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Program Chairs:
Rob Simmonds, University of Calgary, Canada
Francesco Quaglia, University of Rome, Italy

Publicity Chair:
Helen Karatza, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

------------------------------

----------------------------------------

Steering Committee:
S. J.Turner (Chair), Nanyang Tech.Univ.,Singapore
A. S. Elmaghraby (IEEE), Univ. of Louisville, USA
J. Liu, Florida International Univ., USA
K. S.Perumalla, Oak Ridge National Lab., USA
F. Quaglia, Univ. of Rome, Italy
G. F. Riley (ACM), Georgia Inst. of Tech., USA\
B. W. Unger (SCS), Univ. of Calgary, Canada
R. M. Fujimoto (Honorary), Georgia Inst. of Tech., USA

Program Committee:
D. Bauer, High Perf. Technologies, Inc., USA
A. Boukerche, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada
A. Bruzzone, University of Genoa, Italy
W. Cai, Nanyang Tech. Univ., Singapore
C. Carothers, Rensselaer Polytech. Inst., USA
L. Donatiello, Univ. of Bologna, Italy
D. Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab, USA
H. Karatza, Aristotle University of Thesolonica, Greece
A. Lehmann, Univ. der Bundeswehr, Germany
M. Liljenstam, Ericsson Research, Sweden
J. Liu, Florida International Univ., USA
J. Luethi, FHS Kufstein Tirol, Austria
D. M. Nicol, Univ. of Illinois, USA
K. S.Perumalla, Oak Ridge National Lab, USA
P. F. Reynolds, Univ. of Virginia, USA
D. Roberts, Salford Univ., UK
S. J. E. Taylor, Brunel Univ., UK
Y. M. Teo, National Univ. of Singapore
G. Theodoropoulos, Birmingham Univ., UK
C. Tropper, McGill Univ., Canada
S. J. Turner, Nanyang Tech. Univ., Singapore
A. Uhrmacher, Univ. of Rostock, Germany
P. A. Wilsey, Univ. of Cincinnati, USA

Slides from GeoChronos Demonstration at CANARIE NEP Showcase Reception at #banff #summit09 #ogf27

2009-10-14T23:44:00.005-06:00

Presentation shown as part of the GeoChronos Demonstration at the CANARIE NEP Showcase Dinner Reception at Summit 09 in Banff on Oct. 14, 2009.

GeoChronos - CANARIE NEP Showcase Presentation

View more presentations from Cameron Kiddle.

Slides from my presentation in the New Frontiers in Data Integration session at #banff #summit09 #ogf27

2009-10-14T11:29:00.005-06:00

Presentation I gave as part of the New Frontiers in Data Integration session at Summit 09 in Banff on Oct. 14, 2009. It discusses some current work that the Grid Research Centre is doing in relation to data management and integration.

Integration and Management of Diverse Environmental Data Sets

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Slides from Cloud Challenge Demonstration at #banff #summit09 #ogf27

2009-10-13T22:42:00.004-06:00

Presentation I gave as part of a demonstration highlighting cloud computing and social networking efforts of the Grid Research Centre at the Cloud Challenge at Summit 09 in Banff on October 13, 2009.

Dynamic Provisioning of Service Environments with ASPEN

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Schedule of GRC Presentations/Demonstrations at Summit 09

2009-10-07T19:21:00.005-06:00

I will be giving several presentations/demonstrations on behalf of the Grid Research Centre (GRC) at Summit 09 in Banff from Oct. 12 - Oct. 16, 2009. Below is the schedule. Please come check them out if you will be at Summit 09!

6:30p.m., Tuesday Oct. 13, 2009 - Dynamic Provisioning of Service Environments with ASPEN as part of the Summit 09 Cloud Challenge
- I will demonstrate a cloud-based infrastructure for dynamically provisioning virtualized resources called the Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment (ASPEN) , which we developed at the GRC in collaboration with HP Labs. I will showcase two different dynamically provisioned service environments that we are hosting in an ASPEN instance running on the HP Labs Data Centre at the University of Calgary. One is a comprehensive user environment for the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) that allows users to upload and edit input files, submit simulations, interactively visualize results and share results via a Facebook based interface. The other, developed as part of a Cybera funded pilot project, is a graphical rendering environment built on top of the Elgg open source social network platform that enables users to render and share animations/movies. Virtual resources running the services for these environments are dynamically provisioned/reclaimed based on user demand.
10:30a.m., Wednesday Oct. 14, 2009 - Integration and Management of Diverse Environmental Data Sets as part of the New Frontiers in Data Integration Session
- I will give a presentation discussing some projects that the GRC is working on that involve managing and integrating a variety of environmental data sets. I will discuss the use of Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for linking and mapping data and associated metadata and also provide some demonstrations of initial prototypes we have developed.
6:00p.m., Wednesday Oct. 14, 2009 - GeoChronos: An On-line Collaborative Environment for Earth Observation Scientists as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms Exhibition

We will demonstrate a platform called GeoChronos that we are developing as part of a CANARIE funded Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) project. It is an on-line platform leveraging social networking, cloud computing and Semantic Web technologies that is aimed at enabling earth observation scientists to access and share scientific data and applications more easily and to collaborate more effectively.

GRC Partner in New Cybera Pilot Project Initiative: "Cloud Services for Water Management"

2009-10-05T13:47:00.005-06:00

The Grid Research Centre (GRC) is partnering with Cybera, Alberta WaterSMART and Tesera Systems Inc. in a new Cybera pilot project called "Cloud Services for Water Management". The pilot project will explore new ways for integrating Alberta-based water data and other types of data and will explore the use of cloud computing services in managing, processing and visualizing such data. A full media release can be found at http://www.cybera.ca/cybera-joins-collaborative-alberta-water-initiative.

CFP: SIMUTools 2010 (3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques)

2009-10-01T09:33:00.003-06:00

The call for papers for the 3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools 2010), of which I am a member of the technical program committee, is available here.
SIMUTools will be held in Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain from March 15-19, 2010.

Important Dates:

Abstract submission : October 12, 2009
Paper submission : October 19, 2009
Poster submission : December 10, 2009
Tentative rebuttal period : December 11, 2009 to January 9, 2010
Notification of acceptance : January 12, 2010
Camera-ready : February 1, 2010
Conference in Malaga : March 15-19, 2010

CFP: CCV 2010 (Annual International Academic Conference on Cloud Computing and Virtualization)

2009-10-01T08:55:00.004-06:00

The call for papers for the Annual International Academic Conference on Cloud Computing and Virtualization (CCV 2010), of which I am a member of the technical program committee, can be found here. CCV 2010 will be held in Singapore on May 3-4, 2010.

Important Dates:

Abstract Submission: December 17th, 2009
Author Notification: January 25th, 2010
Final Paper Submission: March 8th, 2010

Cyberinfrastructure and its Role in Science

2009-07-23T10:34:00.002-06:00

I recently gave a presentation entitled "Cyberinfrastrucutre and its Role in Science" at IAI International Wireless Sensor Networks Summer School held at the University of Alberta on July 6th, 2009. This presentation examines some of the challenges scientists face and describes various cyberinfrastructure technologies that help address these challenges. Example projects employing cyberinfrastructure technologies that we have worked on at the Grid Research Centre, including the GeoChronos project, are also presented.

Cyberinfrastructure and its Role in Science

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GeoChronos Presentation/Demonstration given at SpecNet Workshop 2009.

2009-06-26T08:43:00.008-06:00

I gave a presentation and demonstration of the GeoChronos platform at the SpecNet Workshop on June 22, 2009 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada as part of the 30th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing. GeoChronos is an on-line platform for earth observation scientists, being developed by the Grid Research Centre, that is aimed at promoting collaboration and sharing of data and applications. The project is being funded as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) Program. SpecNet builds on the existing capabilities of the flux tower network (FLUXNET) by adding spectral measurements to existing flux tower sites at a range of ecosystems around the world. It is a contributing organization to the GeoChronos project.

GeoChronos - SpecNet Workshop 2009 Presentation

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An Assessment of Eucalyptus Version 1.4

2009-05-22T09:27:00.005-06:00

With funding from Cybera, the Grid Research Centre recently conducted an investigation into version 1.4 of the open source Eucalyptus cloud computing platform. While limitations and deficiencies were found, Eucalyptus has many strengths including ease of installation and the Amazon EC2 based interface.
Furthermore, since the time of this investigation version 1.5 of Eucalyptus has been released, addressing some of the limitations/deficiencies that were found.
Also, the Eucalyptus team recently received $5.5 million dollars to form a start up (Eucalyptus Systems). With these developments Eucalyptus is well positioned as a competitor in the cloud computing market.

The following technical report summarizing the findings of our investigation is available here:

Tingxi Tan and Cameron Kiddle. An Assessment of Eucalyptus Version 1.4. Technical Report 2009-928-07, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, May 4, 2009.

GeoChronos Presentation/Demonstration Given at CANARIE NEP-1 Synergy Workshop

2009-04-21T21:14:00.004-06:00

One of the projects that the Grid Research Centre (GRC) is working on is GeoChronos (http://geochronos.org/), an on-line platform for earth observation scientists that facilitates collaboration, sharing of data and sharing of applications. It leverages social networking (Elgg) and cloud computing (ASPEN - another GRC project) technologies and is being funded as part of the CANARIE Network Enabled Platforms (NEP) Program.

Below is a presentation that a gave at the CANARIE NEP-1 Synergy Workshop in Winnipeg on April 21, 2009.

GeoChronos: An On-line Collaborative Platform for Earth Observation Scientists

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CFP: LBSA 2009 - Workshop on Location-based services (LBS) and applications

2008-12-12T13:59:00.002-07:00

Call for Papers:
Workshop on:

"Location-based services (LBS) and applications"

To be held in conjunction with ICPP'09 -
The 2009 International Conference on Parallel Processing
(ICPP-2009)
Co-Sponsored by
The International Association for Computers and Communications (IACC)
The Austrian Computer Society
In cooperation with
The Vienna University of Technology, Austria
The Ohio State University, USA

(Proceedings of the conference and workshops will be published by the IEEE Computer Society)

Description of workshop

The Location-based services (LBS) and applications workshop aims to bring together pervasive concepts starting from the integration of mobility based services and not limited to the techniques concerning the data management and services, which are at the core of such systems. Data organization and management, as well as system interoperability of wireless systems in order to provide location aware services, are of the prime focuses of this workshop. With the development of mobile communication, location-based services and applications represent a novel challenge both conceptually and technically. On demand and reactive applications is a part of everyday's life running on computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), phones and on personal blackboards. This workshop aims to examine recent advances in this field and promote the optimization of the existence of standards, as well as present efficient computing power consumption techniques for enabling the survivability of such enterprises. In addition, this workshop aims at presenting recent advances in the technical description of LBS, and in a research way present the various concepts that serve as a support to mobile LBS. The Location-based services (LBS) and applications workshop primarily aims to be a research forum for the exchange of ideas, techniques, and applications among practitioners of wireless service in industry, government, and academia.

The present workshop will be concerned with the issues that are important to modern wireless and/or wired communications related to Location-based services and establishment techniques as well as monitor a distributed way of providing these services. Dynamic adverts and services provision and middleware adaptation strategies for providing LBS and the necessity for more sophisticated prediction of actions for providing these services are in essence a main part of this workshop. Also the distributed and diagnostic analysis with model-driven approaches to LBS issues will be a special focus of the workshop.

Original research contributions in all areas of LBS and/or applications are welcome.
Particularly the papers aim to present work in the following topical areas:

Workshop is particularly seeking papers in the following topical areas:

§ Object-Oriented LBS in distributed environments
§ Navigation Systems and spatial database perspectives
§ Languages, Tools, and Environments for enabling Location-based services
§ Web interface and Web-based Modelling for Location-based services
§ Navigation systems meta-modelling in distributed environments
§ Middleware for Location-Based Services in distributed systems
§ LBS Interoperability through Standards
§ Data Collection for Location-Based Services in distributed systems
§ Data Transmission in Mobile Communication Systems
§ LBA Distributed Systems and Databases
§ LBA Parallel Processing Systems
§ Wireless systems' simulation based Performance Analysis
§ Network Modelling and Simulation
§ Sensor Location-based service Networks
§ Service provision in Wireless and Mobile Networking and Computing
§ Large Scale Systems Location-based services provision (metropolitan coverage but not limited to)
§ Clusters and Grids for Location-based services in distributed environments
§ Applications of Location-based services in distributed systems
§ Parallel and Distributed Applications and Algorithms for Location-based services
§ Power-aware location-based services
§ Distributed and parallel support systems for Location-based services
§ Resource Management and Scheduling in distributed systems
§ Mobile Peer-to-Peer reliability and connectivity
§ Web-based Computing and service-oriented distributed architectures

Workshop Chair
Prof. Helen Karatza
Department of Informatics
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
54124 Thessaloniki
Greece

Tel. : +30 (2310) 997974
Fax : +30 (2310) 998419
Email: karatza@csd.auth.gr

Workshop co-chair
Dr. Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Nicosia
46 Makedonitissas Avenue, P.O.Box 24005
1700 Nicosia
CYPRUS

Tel. : +357-22-841730
Fax : +357-22-357481
Email: mavromoustakis.c@unic.ac.cy

Technical Program Committee members:

Antonio Marcos Alberti, Inatel, National Inst. of Telecommunications, Brazil
Christos Bouras, University of Patras and Research Academic Computer
Technology Institute, Greece
Yinong Chen, Arizona State University, USA
Wai Chen, Telcordia Technologies, New Jersey, U.S.A
Giovanni Chiola, University of Genoa, Italy
Dimitrios Filippopoulos, Technological Educational Institute of Larissa,
Greece
George Mastorakis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
Angelo Furfaro, University of Calabria, Italy
Orhan Gemikonakli, Middlesex University, United Kingdom
Carlos Juiz, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain
George Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Cameron Kiddle, University of Calgary, Canada
Manolis Koubarakis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Geyong Min, University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Athena Stassopoulou, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Libero Nigro, University of Calabria, Italy
Sotiris Nikoletseas, University of Patras and CTI, Greece
Irfan Awan, University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Murtuza Shabbir Jadliwala, Laboratory for Computer Communications and
Applications, EPFL, Switzerland
Michael Devetsikiotis, North Carolina State University, USA
Georgios Papadimitriou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Frode Eika Sandnes, Oslo University College, Norway
Fabricio Alves Barbosa da Silva, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Robert Simon, George Mason University, USA
Charalabos Skianis, University of the Aegean, Greece
Lynda Mokdad, Universite Paris Dauphine, France
Tomeu Serra, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain
Nikos Antonopoulos, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Evgenia Smirni, College of William & Mary, USA
Peter Triantafillou, University of Patras, Greece
Vasos Vasiliou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Manos Varvarigos, University of Patras, Greece
Philip Wilsey, Cliftonlabs, USA
Jing ZHOU, University of China, China

Important dates:

Workshop day: 22nd Sept. 2009
Paper Submission Deadline: 28th February 2009
Acceptance Notification: 15th of April 2009
Camera-Ready Paper: 15th of June 2009

PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors are invited to submit original research manuscripts (unpublished research and recent developments) in the topics related to the workshop.

Only papers that have not been previously published or presented should be submitted.

Refer to Workshop's web page at:
http://www.cs.unic.ac.cy/cmavrom/ICPPw/

GRC to Give Cloud Computing/Social Networking Demo at SC08

2008-11-13T12:41:00.005-07:00

I will be giving a demonstration of some of the research the Grid Research Centre (GRC) is working on at SC08 in Austin next week. Below are the details.

Where: Compute Canada Booth #2439 (at SC08 in Austin, Texas)

When:

Tuesday November 18, 2008: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday November 19, 2008: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Title: Leveraging Social Networking and Cloud Computing Technologies in the Development of Collaborative Computing Environments

Abstract: Social networking and cloud computing technologies are revolutionizing the way computing resources are accessed and managed. At the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary, and in collaboration with HP Labs, we are exploring how these technologies can be leveraged to develop comprehensive and collaborative computing environments. We have developed a cloud-based infrastructure called the Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment (ASPEN) that dynamically allocates virtualized resources to different services based on demand. Two prototype collaborative computing environments will be demonstrated. One uses the Facebook social networking platform to provide users with one-stop shop access to the Fire Dynamics Simulator and affiliated services. The other uses the Ning social networking platform to provide access to an animation rendering service. Services for both environments are hosted on the ASPEN cloud-based infrastructure.

GRC at Cybera Summit 08

2008-10-30T09:21:00.004-06:00

I recently attended Cybera Summit 08 in Banff (September 29-30, 2008) where I gave a couple of presentations on projects we are working on at the Grid Research Centre (GRC). The presentations were as follows:

Cloud Computing on the HP Labs Data Centre at the University of Calgary

This presentation gave an overview of cloud computing and highlighted the GRCs cloud computing research efforts on the HP Labs Data Centre at the University of Calgary. We are working on the development of ASPEN, an Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment. It is aimed at effectively utilizing virtual machine technologies to enable data centre automation and to support dynamic and scalable provisioning of cloud services. We are also exploring the use of social networking platforms in providing access to cloud services. This work is being done in collaboration with HP Labs.

Rendering on the Cloud: A Cybera Industry Pilot Project with EDM Studio

This presentation gave an overview of a Cybera Industry Pilot Project with EDM Studio Inc. that the GRC is working on. The goal of the project is to create an on-demand cloud-based rendering service for generating animations. In the completed phase 1 of the project a static environment in the HP Labs Data Centre at the University of Calgary for rendering images was created. Phase 2 of the project, currently in progress, is aimed at the development of an on-demand, dynamic rendering service that will be supported using ASPEN described above. Other aims of phase 2 include the use of data management tools to more efficiently move and manage data and the development of a collaborative user portal, that leverages social networking technologies, for accessing the data management and rendering services.

Both of these presentations, as well as other presentations from the Cybera Summit are available on slideshare.

HPC/Grid/Cloud Computing Conferences

2008-09-03T09:09:00.003-06:00

Below is a public google calendar I have created that contains submission deadlines and dates for upcoming HPC, grid computing, cloud computing and other related conferences. I will try and keep the calendar up to date with new conferences and deadlines as I come across them. The calendar is certainly not complete, so if you know of any conferences that I have missed please let me know and I will add them to the calendar.

Using Cloud Computing and Web 2.0 Technologies to Create Comprehensive User Environments

2008-08-21T11:23:00.000-06:00

At the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary, and in collaboration with HP Labs, we have been exploring how cloud computing and Web 2.0 technologies can be used in academic and enterprise settings to provide users with comprehensive and transparent environments for accessing applications. Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook) allow users to keep connected and provide easy access to a wide variety of applications. We feel that the use of social networking platforms in academia and enterprise will allow researchers and employees to more easily collaborate and share information with each other. They could also provide a more unified and transparent interface for accessing applications. As demand for applications can vary significantly and is difficult to determine before they are deployed, it would be advantageous to run applications on cloud computing infrastructures where they can be scaled easily according to demand.

To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach we have developed a demonstrator that provides users with a comprehensive and transparent environment for accessing the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) , an application developed by NIST. Facebook was used as a social networking platform to provide access to FDS. Users are able to upload and edit input files, submit and resubmit simulations, visualize results, share and discuss results with other users, etc., all in a single integrated environment. Virtual machine technology was used to develop a cloud computing infrastructure to host the simulations and visualizations. The infrastructure is able to dynamically adapt and scale according to demand.

Below is a video of the demonstrator including some introductory slides. A version of the video in much larger resolution is available here.

Some papers we have published related to this work include:

R. Curry, C. Kiddle, N. Markatchev, R. Simmonds, T. Tan, M. Arlitt, and B. Walker. ASPEN: An Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment for Data Centres. In Proceedings of the 15th HP Software University Association Workshop (HP-SUA), 2008.

R. Curry, C. Kiddle, N. Markatchev, R. Simmonds, T. Tan, M. Arlitt, and B. Walker. Facebook Meets the Virtualized Enterprise. To appear in Proceedings of the 12th International IEEE Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC), 2008. (An extended version of this paper appears as an HP Labs Technical Report: HPL-2008-72.)