Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability

Suchismita Hoare, Na Helian, and Nathan Baddoo, 'A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability', in Proceedings of the The IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Toulouse, France, 18-21, July 2016. DOI: 10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0126 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is poised for a wider adoption by its relevant stakeholders, especially Cloud application developers. Despite this, the service model is still plagued with several adoption inhibitors, one of which is lack of interoperability between proprietary application infrastructure services of public PaaS solutions. Although there is some progress in addressing the general PaaS interoperability issue through various devised solutions focused primarily on API compatibility and platform-agnostic application design models, interoperability specific to differentiated services provided by the existing public PaaS providers and the resultant disparity owing to the offered services’ semantics has not been addressed effectively, yet. The literature indicates that this dimension of PaaS interoperability is awaiting evolution in the state-of-the-art. This paper proposes the initial system design of a PaaS interoperability (IntPaaS) framework to be developed through the integration of semantic and agent technologies to enable transparent interoperability between incompatible PaaS services. This will involve uniform description through semantic annotation of PaaS provider services utilizing the OWL-S ontology, creating a knowledgebase that enables software agents to automatically search for suitable services to support Cloud-based Greenfield application development. The rest of the paper discusses the identified research problem along with the proposed solution to address the issue.Submitted Versio