Cloud Computing Architecture for eLearning Systems in Secondary Schools in Tanzania

In recent years, schools have been investing heavily on information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure to implement eLearning systems to enhance the quality of education in secondary schools in Tanzania. The majority of these systems are implemented using a traditional web-based eLearning approach on school premises which is costly and limits usage due to lack of scalability and flexibility. Consequently, many schools have started adopting cloud computing as a solution. However, this adaption depends on well-defined cloud eLearning architecture. This study proposed cloud architecture for implementing an eLearning system in secondary schools in Tanzania by adopting various layers proposed in previous studies. The effectiveness of this proposal was evaluated by comparing its performance with a similar traditional web-based eLearning system using the Moodle benchmark tool and Apache Jmeter. The study found that eLearning systems implemented in the cloud-based infrastructure had better performance metrics than web-based eLearning systems on school premises

A survey of the European Open Science Cloud services for expanding the capacity and capabilities of multidisciplinary scientific applications

Open Science is a paradigm in which scientific data, procedures, tools and results are shared transparently and reused by society. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative is an effort in Europe to provide an open, trusted, virtual and federated computing environment to execute scientific applications and store, share and reuse research data across borders and scientific disciplines. Additionally, scientific services are becoming increasingly data-intensive, not only in terms of computationally intensive tasks but also in terms of storage resources. To meet those resource demands, computing paradigms such as High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud Computing are applied to e-science applications. However, adapting applications and services to these paradigms is a challenging task, commonly requiring a deep knowledge of the underlying technologies, which often constitutes a general barrier to its uptake by scientists. In this context, EOSC-Synergy, a collaborative project involving more than 20 institutions from eight European countries pooling their knowledge and experience to enhance EOSC’s capabilities and capacities, aims to bring EOSC closer to the scientific communities. This article provides a summary analysis of the adaptations made in the ten thematic services of EOSC-Synergy to embrace this paradigm. These services are grouped into four categories: Earth Observation, Environment, Biomedicine, and Astrophysics. The analysis will lead to the identification of commonalities, best practices and common requirements, regardless of the thematic area of the service. Experience gained from the thematic services can be transferred to new services for the adoption of the EOSC ecosystem framework. The article made several recommendations for the integration of thematic services in the EOSC ecosystem regarding Authentication and Authorization (federated regional or thematic solutions based on EduGAIN mainly), FAIR data and metadata preservation solutions (both at cataloguing and data preservation—such as EUDAT’s B2SHARE), cloud platform-agnostic resource management services (such as Infrastructure Manager) and workload management solutions.This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 857647, EOSC-Synergy, European Open Science Cloud - Expanding Capacities by building Capabilities. Moreover, this work is partially funded by grant No 2015/24461-2, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Francisco Brasileiro is a CNPq/Brazil researcher (grant 308027/2020-5).Peer Reviewed"Article signat per 20 autors/es: Amanda Calatrava, Hernán Asorey, Jan Astalos, Alberto Azevedo, Francesco Benincasa, Ignacio Blanquer, Martin Bobak, Francisco Brasileiro, Laia Codó, Laura del Cano, Borja Esteban, Meritxell Ferret, Josef Handl, Tobias Kerzenmacher, Valentin Kozlov, Aleš Křenek, Ricardo Martins, Manuel Pavesio, Antonio Juan Rubio-Montero, Juan Sánchez-Ferrero "Postprint (published version

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (Referencia da bolsa: SFRH SFRH / BD / 33965 / 2009) and EC 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° FITMAN 604674 (http://www.fitman-fi.eu