LEGaTO: first steps towards energy-efficient toolset for heterogeneous computing

LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design and evaluation of a genomics variant analysis pipeline using GATK Spark tools

Scalable and efficient processing of genome sequence data, i.e. for variant discovery, is key to the mainstream adoption of High Throughput technology for disease prevention and for clinical use. Achieving scalability, however, requires a significant effort to enable the parallel execution of the analysis tools that make up the pipelines. This is facilitated by the new Spark versions of the well-known GATK toolkit, which offer a black-box approach by transparently exploiting the underlying Map Reduce architecture. In this paper we report on our experience implementing a standard variant discovery pipeline using GATK 4.0 with Docker-based deployment over a cluster. We provide a preliminary performance analysis, comparing the processing times and cost to those of the new Microsoft Genomics Services

Foggy clouds and cloudy fogs: a real need for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud computing systems

The recent advances in cloud services technology are fueling a plethora of information technology innovation, including networking, storage, and computing. Today, various flavors have evolved of IoT, cloud computing, and so-called fog computing, a concept referring to capabilities of edge devices and users' clients to compute, store, and exchange data among each other and with the cloud. Although the rapid pace of this evolution was not easily foreseeable, today each piece of it facilitates and enables the deployment of what we commonly refer to as a smart scenario, including smart cities, smart transportation, and smart homes. As most current cloud, fog, and network services run simultaneously in each scenario, we observe that we are at the dawn of what may be the next big step in the cloud computing and networking evolution, whereby services might be executed at the network edge, both in parallel and in a coordinated fashion, as well as supported by the unstoppable technology evolution. As edge devices become richer in functionality and smarter, embedding capacities such as storage or processing, as well as new functionalities, such as decision making, data collection, forwarding, and sharing, a real need is emerging for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud (F2C) computing systems. This article introduces a layered F2C architecture, its benefits and strengths, as well as the arising open and research challenges, making the case for the real need for their coordinated management. Our architecture, the illustrative use case presented, and a comparative performance analysis, albeit conceptual, all clearly show the way forward toward a new IoT scenario with a set of existing and unforeseen services provided on highly distributed and dynamic compute, storage, and networking resources, bringing together heterogeneous and commodity edge devices, emerging fogs, as well as conventional clouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Training materials for different categories of users

Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use, Production Economics, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Mobile Computing in Digital Ecosystems: Design Issues and Challenges

In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g., portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem, i.e., an ecosystem constructed out of so-called digital organisms (see below), that can foster the development of novel distributed services. In this context, a human user equipped with his/her own mobile devices, can be though of as a digital organism (DO), a subsystem characterized by a set of peculiar features and resources it can offer to the rest of the ecosystem for use from its peer DOs. The internal organization of the DO must address issues of management of its own resources, including power consumption. Inside the DO and among DOs, peer-to-peer interaction mechanisms can be conveniently deployed to favor resource sharing and data dissemination. Throughout this paper, we show that most of the solutions and technologies needed to construct a digital ecosystem are already available. What is still missing is a framework (i.e., mechanisms, protocols, services) that can support effectively the integration and cooperation of these technologies. In addition, in the following we show that that framework can be implemented as a middleware subsystem that enables novel and ubiquitous forms of computation and communication. Finally, in order to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce some experimental results we have obtained from preliminary implementations of (parts of) that subsystem.Comment: Proceedings of the 7th International wireless Communications and Mobile Computing conference (IWCMC-2011), Emergency Management: Communication and Computing Platforms Worksho