3rd EGEE User Forum

We have organized this book in a sequence of chapters, each chapter associated with an application or technical theme introduced by an overview of the contents, and a summary of the main conclusions coming from the Forum for the chapter topic. The first chapter gathers all the plenary session keynote addresses, and following this there is a sequence of chapters covering the application flavoured sessions. These are followed by chapters with the flavour of Computer Science and Grid Technology. The final chapter covers the important number of practical demonstrations and posters exhibited at the Forum. Much of the work presented has a direct link to specific areas of Science, and so we have created a Science Index, presented below. In addition, at the end of this book, we provide a complete list of the institutes and countries involved in the User Forum

Smart Itinerary Smartphone Tourism Application

Even though tourism is a large and important part of the Armenian economy, Armenia’s tourism infrastructure is not as robust as other more mature tourist locations around the world. This project was focused on designing a mobile tourism application, tailored to Armenia that will help develop and mature its tourism market. We hoped to empower Armenia by bolstering interest in and access to Armenia and developing its tourism industry. Smart Itinerary stands out from other tourist applications due to its vast collection of Armenia-specific information along with its ability to provide a unique itinerary for each individual tourist based on their personal interests. Overall, we believe we have designed a tourism application that will help make Armenia a more accessible tourist location

Application Migration Effort in the Cloud

Over the last years, the utilization of cloud resources has been steadily rising and an increasing number of enterprises are moving applications to the cloud. A leading trend is the adoption of Platform as a Service to support rapid application deployment. By providing a managed environment, cloud platforms take away a lot of complex configuration effort required to build scalable applications. However, application migrations to and between clouds cost development effort and open up new risks of vendor lock-in. This is problematic because frequent migrations may be necessary in the dynamic and fast changing cloud market. So far, the effort of application migration in PaaS environments and typical issues experienced in this task are hardly understood. To improve this situation, we present a cloud-to-cloud migration of a real-world application to seven representative cloud platforms. In this case study, we analyze the feasibility of the migrations in terms of portability and the effort of the migrations. We present a Docker-based deployment system that provides the ability of isolated and reproducible measurements of deployments to platform vendors, thus enabling the comparison of platforms for a particular application. Using this system, the study identifies key problems during migrations and quantifies these differences by distinctive metrics

Exploring data sharing obligations in the technology sector

This report addresses the question: What is the role of data in the technology sector and what are the opportunities and risks of mandatory data sharing? The answer provides insights into costs and benefits of variants of data sharing obligations with and between technology companies

Governance of Cloud-hosted Web Applications

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way developers implement and deploy applications. By running applications on large-scale compute infrastructures and programming platforms that are remotely accessible as utility services, cloud computing provides scalability, high availability, and increased user productivity.Despite the advantages inherent to the cloud computing model, it has also given rise to several software management and maintenance issues. Specifically, cloud platforms do not enforce developer best practices, and other administrative requirements when deploying applications. Cloud platforms also do not facilitate establishing service level objectives (SLOs) on application performance, which are necessary to ensure reliable and consistent operation of applications. Moreover, cloud platforms do not provide adequate support to monitor the performance of deployed applications, and conduct root cause analysis when an application exhibits a performance anomaly.We employ governance as a methodology to address the above mentioned issues prevalent in cloud platforms. We devise novel governance solutions that achieve administrative conformance, developer best practices, and performance SLOs in the cloud via policy enforcement, SLO prediction, performance anomaly detection and root cause analysis. The proposed solutions are fully automated, and built into the cloud platforms as cloud-native features thereby precluding the application developers from having to implement similar features by themselves. We evaluate our methodology using real world cloud platforms, and show that our solutions are highly effective and efficient

Collaborative development of predictive toxicology applications

OpenTox provides an interoperable, standards-based Framework for the support of predictive toxicology data management, algorithms, modelling, validation and reporting. It is relevant to satisfying the chemical safety assessment requirements of the REACH legislation as it supports access to experimental data, (Quantitative) Structure-Activity Relationship models, and toxicological information through an integrating platform that adheres to regulatory requirements and OECD validation principles. Initial research defined the essential components of the Framework including the approach to data access, schema and management, use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies, architecture, web service and communications protocols, and selection and integration of algorithms for predictive modelling. OpenTox provides end-user oriented tools to non-computational specialists, risk assessors, and toxicological experts in addition to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for developers of new applications. OpenTox actively supports public standards for data representation, interfaces, vocabularies and ontologies, Open Source approaches to core platform components, and community-based collaboration approaches, so as to progress system interoperability goals

Austrian High-Performance-Computing meeting (AHPC2020)

This booklet is a collection of abstracts presented at the AHPC conference