In short, three different fellowships are available:

1. Research Fellowship: For individuals without a PhD who are considering pursuing research studies.
2. PhD Scholarship: For those who wish to pursue a PhD in Switzerland for a period of 3+ years.
3. Post-Doc Scholarship: For individuals with a PhD who are looking to spend one year in Switzerland conducting postdoctoral research.

Please note that all fellowships are intended for individuals who have not previously spent time in Switzerland. Consequently, if you are awarded one of these fellowships, you will be ineligible to apply for the others in the future as you technicaly already have a Phd or Postdoc in Switzerland.

Let’s see each one of them in dettail:

Research Fellowship

Research Fellowships are 12-month programs aimed at highly qualified postgraduate researchers from all academic disciplines. Applicants must have obtained a master’s degree or equivalent by July 31, 2024, except for ETH Zurich applicants, who must meet this requirement by June 30, 2024. Candidates should be born after December 31, 1988. The application requires a support letter from an academic host professor at a Swiss university, including a brief CV (maximum 2 pages), explaining their willingness to supervise and support the research. This letter differs from the confidential recommendation letter also required. Additionally, applicants must submit a research proposal with a defined time frame. Notably, this fellowship is not available to those who already hold a PhD degree

PhD Scholarship

PhD Scholarships are designed for highly qualified PhD students from all academic disciplines, offering funding for 12 to 36 months, extendable in three 12-month increments based on academic progress. Applicants must have obtained a master’s degree or equivalent by July 31, 2024, except for ETH Zurich applicants, who must meet this requirement by June 30, 2024. Eligible candidates should be born after December 31, 1988. The application requires a support letter from an academic host professor at a Swiss university, including a brief CV (maximum 2 pages), detailing their commitment to supervise and support the PhD throughout its duration. If an assistant professor supports the application, a full professor must co-sign the letter. This support letter is distinct from the confidential recommendation letter also required. For PhD studies at a University of Applied Sciences, an additional support letter from a faculty member of the host research university is mandatory. The doctoral degree must be awarded by a research university. A detailed research proposal with a defined time frame is the centerpiece of the application and requires thorough attention.

Post-Doc Scholarship

Postdoctoral Scholarships are 12-month programs aimed at highly qualified early career scientists from all scientific fields. Eligible candidates must have completed their PhD between December 31, 2020, and July 31, 2024 (June 30, 2024, for ETH Zurich), and primarily for those who have not previously studied in Switzerland. The program does not fund sabbaticals. Applicants need a support letter from an academic host professor at a Swiss university, including a brief CV (maximum 2 pages), explaining their willingness to supervise the research. Former PhD mentors and co-directors for co-tutelle PhDs cannot be supervisors. A detailed research proposal with a timeframe is the centerpiece of the application. This scholarship is exclusively for full-time postdoctoral research in Switzerland, prohibiting fieldwork outside the country, and recipients are expected to reside in Switzerland during the grant period. For double doctorates, the date of the first degree is considered. The scholarship is not valid for mixed research conducted partly in Switzerland and partly in another country.

Where to find more Information

The official link of the scholarship contains all the relevant information and is the “GO TO” resources:

• https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/sbfi/en/home/education/scholarships-and-grants/swiss-government-excellence-scholarships.html

Additionally, each country has specific information and details regarding the application procedure, which can be found at the following link.

• https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/dam/sbfi/en/dokumente/2022/07/all-countries.pdf.download.pdf/2023_ESKAS_all_country_contacts_A_to_Z_for_application_documents.pdf

I recommend relying on the official information provided at the link above. The program itself warns about potential scams, and while there are numerous YouTube videos on the topic, some are generated by ChatGPT and others are, for lack of a better word, “dubious.” Here, I share videos from two YouTubers who, in my opinion, offer a reliable overview of the program. From Jama, part 1:

And part 2:

As well as from Aatiya:

My personal suggestions:

If you are interested in applying for a Phd or Postdoc in Switzerland, here are my personal suggestions:

1. Start Early (Paperwork): The application process is deliberately complex to filter out unmotivated candidates. The responsibility for managing the paperwork falls entirely on you, so begin early to ensure you have ample time to complete everything accurately.
2. Start Early (Connections in Switzerland): A critical aspect of the application is obtaining a support letter from a professor in Switzerland who is willing to endorse your candidacy and confirm that your proposal aligns with their and their institution’s research. Building these connections early is essential.
3. Start Early (Your Research Proposal): Develop a meaningful and well-written research proposal as soon as possible. Without a solid proposal, it will be challenging to secure support from a professor. You are solely responsible for writing this proposal. Once you have a polished version formatted according to the required templates, use it as your business card when reaching out to potential professors in Switzerland. Without this document, your communication is likely to be ignored or flagged as spam.

In other words, your commitment and the importance of contacting your potential supervisor as early as possible, armed with all the relevant information, cannot be overstated. This official video from the program provides additional valuable suggestions:

In addition, please note that each professor will not/cam not endorse more then one (or two) candidates per year. Therefore many of the request may simply be not answered.

Can I help you further for your Phd or Postdoc in Switzerland?

It really depends. For this specific grant you (the applicant) are really responsible for doing the heavy lifting as well as for dealing with the dettails. As for the rest, (i) if you believe that you have what it takes for this fellowship, (ii) you fulfill all the requirements, (iii) you have a nice idea to pursue and (iv) it is related to one of the following areas:

1. Internet of Things (IoT): Refers to the network of interconnected devices and objects that can communicate and share data. IoT enables smart homes, industrial automation, and more.
2. Extended Reality (XR): Encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). XR technologies blend digital content with the real world, enhancing user experiences.
3. Human Behavioral Informatics: The study of human behavior using data analytics and computational methods. It involves understanding patterns, preferences, and decision-making based on digital interactions.
4. Computer Vision: A field of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling machines to interpret visual information from images or videos. Applications include facial recognition, object detection, and medical imaging.
5. Language Processing: Also known as natural language processing (NLP), it involves teaching computers to understand and generate human language. NLP powers chatbots, language translation, and sentiment analysis.
6. Security and Privacy: Addresses safeguarding data, systems, and networks from unauthorized access or breaches. It includes encryption, authentication, and privacy-preserving techniques.
7. Big Data Processing: Deals with managing and analyzing large volumes of data. Technologies like Hadoop and Spark enable efficient processing of massive datasets.
8. Distributed Systems: Involves designing and managing systems that run on multiple interconnected computers. Examples include cloud computing, peer-to-peer networks, and distributed databases.
9. Serverless Computing: A cloud computing model where developers focus on writing code without managing servers. Serverless platforms automatically scale resources based on demand.
10. Digital Decision Making: The process of using data-driven insights and algorithms to make informed choices in various domains, such as business, healthcare, and finance.

You can consider dropping me a line! Are you still finishing your thesis instead? These guides may help!

Good Luck!

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Current cloud service description languages envision the ability to automatically combine cloud service offerings across multiple abstraction layers, i.e. software, platform, and infrastructure service offerings, to achieve a common shared business goal. However, only little effort has
been spent in this direction. This paper formalizes the issue of automatic combination of cloud services showing its computationally intensive nature. In order to overcome this issue we propose a Resource Description Framework (RDF)- based prototype implementation that leverages a batch process for automatically constructing possible combinations of cloud services. Using this approach we are able to analyze possible combinations of cloud services that may fit particular customer needs in a timely fashion

Some relevant Key words: Cloud, Cloud Services, Service, Composition, RDF for Cloud

Cloud resources offered as services can be described using a common schema model and hence can be composed in order to achieve a common business goal. We present in this paper the issue of composing cross-layered cloud services to build a Service-based Cloud Application (SBCA), and formalize it as a tree navigation algorithm involving external approaches for matching cloud service descriptions.
Given the fact that there could be a huge number of cloud service offerings in a real marketplace, this algorithm may grow exponentially and become a computationally intensive task. For our prototype implementation, RDF is used to create a sample model containing sample cloud service offerings, a batch process is implemented to continuously scan the model and discover possible compositions of cloud services, and SPARQL is used to retrieve cloud services and their possible compositions in a timely fashion. In the future, we intend to continue investigating the issue of cross-layered cloud service composition in order to discover and quantify the benefits and the limits of this approach by providing experimental results.

Full article available at the following link:

Issue in Automatic Combination of Cloud Services:
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPA.2012.71

Your help in sharing the idea is very welcome!

Cite this paper as:

D. K. Nguyen and F. Lelli, Issue in Automatic Combination of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, 10th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Application ISPA 2012 track Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds, Spain, Madrid, July 2012

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#issues in #automatic Combination of #Cloud #services for #CloudComputing #RDF and understanding meta-information
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National Grid Initiatives or Infrastructures (NGIs) are organisations set up by individual countries to manage the computing resources they provide to the European e-Infrastructure (EGI). NGIs are EGI’s main stakeholders, together with CERN and EMBL, two European Intergovernmental Research Organisations (EIROs).
Each NGIs contributes a number of sites to the grid infrastructure. NGIs are responsible for the maintenance and running of the sites they operate.

European Grid Initiative

In particular SwiNG’s mission is to:

• Ensure competitiveness of Swiss science, education and industry by creating value through resource sharing.
• Establish and coordinate a sustainable Swiss Grid infrastructure as a dynamic network of resources across different locations and administrative domains.
• Provide a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration to leverage the Swiss Grid activities, supporting end-users, researchers, education centers, resource providers and industry.
• Represent the interests of the national Grid community towards other national and international bodies.

It offer the following services to researchers and research groups:

• Scientific applications
• Tools
• Seminars and Training
• Events / seminars
• Engagement with Funding Agencies

As well as connecting research and industry partners with IT providers across Switzerland.

Withing SwiNG developed a couple of use cases. The first was related to the integration of volunteering computing with the “classical” computational infrastructure. The second integrated high level malware (workflow) into the Grid user interface in order to achieve proper optimization of the processes. In particular we created a wrap interface around the NorduGrid UI in order to offer API access to the computational facility.

Links:

• SwiNG in the EGI Wiki
• Official Website of SwiNG

Some relevant publications includes:

• This is work in progress, just look at the full list of publication here

If this is not the research project that you are looking for, at this link you can see the full list of projects

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In the past few years, the idea of extending the Grid to cover also the remote access, control, management of instrument devices has been explored in a few initiatives. Existing tools lack in generality and require advanced specialized computer science knowledge, thus making them difficult to be broadly adopted in the scientific community. In this paper we present a new open source initiative that is designed to overcome these problems. The Tiny Instrument Element project defines a high level architecture for plugging instruments into the Grid and provides the corresponding skeleton implementation. This lightweight approach, as opposed to existing middleware-based solutions, reduces the effort required to Gridify existing instruments. The paper evaluates the proposed abstraction with a case study from a pervasive computing scenario.

Some relevant Key words: IoT, Internet of things, smart devices, cloud computing, web service, ubiquitous computing, plugin.

In this paper we present the Tiny Instrument Element project showing our proposed novel approach to the integration between instruments and the Grid. Instead of building a new middleware we propose to use a semifinite artifact (i.e., a skeleton software) that can be tailored to meet the requirements of a specific instrument characteristics. This approach not only provides an uniform access to the Gridified instruments but also leaves the flexibility to customize and tune the Tiny Instrument Element for optimal monitoring and control of the instruments. From the case study we have seen that none of the code included in the Tiny Instrument Element release was redundant and that the time required in order to gain a good understanding of the API and the corresponding skeleton was quite small. This supports the idea of template-based software development. The Project has started full open source activities in September 2008. If we exclude our personal activity and the one performed by the case study participants, until the end of 2008, the project website attracted 304 unique visitors (7 Returning many times). The source code was downloaded 40 times and the authors were contacted with positive feedback by 2 users of the community. Whereas the project has been running for a relatively short time, these numbers are promising and show the benefit of a transparent development process to achieve wider dissemination of our research ideas

Full article available at the following link:

The Tiny Instrument Element:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01671-4_27

Read the paper at this link

Your help in sharing the idea is very welcome!

Cite this paper as:

F. Lelli and C. Pautasso The Tiny Instrument Element Project In proc of 4th International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing (GPC) , Geneva, Switzerland, May 2009

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The #tiny Instrument Element for integrating #IoT and #Cloud . An early precursor of #EdgeComputing
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Web 2.0 communities emerge regularly with the growing need for domain-specific programming over Web APIs. Even though Web mashups provide access to Web APIs, they ignore domain-specific programming needs. On the other hand, developing domain-specific languages (DSLs) is costly and not feasible for such ad hoc communities. We propose User Language Domain (ULD): an intermediate Web based architecture using a domain-specific embedded languages approach that reduces the cost of DSL development to plugging the Web APIs into a host end user programming language. We have implemented the proposed architecture in the context of smart devices, where we plug the functionality of different Lego Mindstorms devices into a Web-based visual programming language. We expect that several domains, such as smart homes or wearable computers can use the ULD architecture to reduce development effort.

Some relevant Key words: domain specific languages, Web 2.0 communities, end user programming, plugin architecture, smart devices, ubiquitous computing.

Our case study of smart devices helps to show the promise of separating functionality from the end user programming language in end user programming. Currently, web based artifacts are released together with a set of open APIs that can be used by their customers for building extensions. Our solution allows an efficient way of embedding these APIs into a customizable wed based end user programming environment. Based on this case study we note that:

• The idea of adopting a plugin architecture introduces a tradeoff between (i) having a standardized and uniform access to different APIs and (ii) having a completely free set of methods. In the first case the realization of the Application Domains Library is simpler and portable. However, the introduction of domain dedicated features is more complex.
• In the realized prototype we have considered the possibility of separating the functionality from the visualization. However, we could also embed in the APIs a set of metadata for the visualization of the instructions and this will result in a more uniform adoption across possible domain languages.
• The end user programming language developed in this case study runs completely on the client side of the Web browser. By using JavaScript as the assembly language of the Web, the underlying compiler of the programming language compiles the visual language into the complete JavaScript application. Since JavaScript is an event-based programming language, the compiler is forced to map the visual programming language to an event-based language.
• In our case study, the provided visual language consists of methods that can be treated as events and be triggered upon calling them; hence it is straightforward to map this language to an event-based language. However, in case of need for other programming paradigms, such as functional programming or data-flow programming, the mapping to an event-based language is more complex.
• Server-side execution of end user developed applications creates a trade-off between flexibility and interactivity. Although server-side compilation and execution increases the flexibility on possible technologies and methods to be used for compilation and execution, it hampers interactivity during application execution, which is important in domains such as scientific simulations and games. A hybrid solution between client and server-side execution has to be chosen according to the domain.

In this paper we propose ULD, a Web-based architecture to separate the domain functionality from the programming language to support programming in the highly dynamic ecosystem of Web 2.0 communities. We devise a plugin architecture for an end user programming language to be used as a host language into which the functionality of multiple domains can be plugged. We apply our architecture in the context of smart devices. As a result, end users are provided with a visual programming environment to program different Lego Mindstorms devices. The visual programming interface is automatically generated from the device functionality and embedded into the programming environment. The adoption of the Web for end user programming opens new frontiers for collaborative developments. The developed case study will serve as a testbed where we will evaluate different collaborative end user programming tools and methods in order to assess the potential of end user programming in online social environments and understanding their challenges.

Full article available at the following link:

Supporting Domain-Specific Programming in Web 2.0: a Case Study of Smart Devices: https://doi.org/10.1109/ASWEC.2010.36

Read the paper at this link

Your help in sharing the idea is very welcome!

Cite this paper as:

N. Ahmadi, F. Lelli and M. Jazayeri Supporting Domain-Specific Programming in Web 2.0: a Case Study of Smart Devices, In proc of 21st Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), Auckland, New Zealand, April 2010

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• The Many Faces of the Integration of Instruments and the Grid

Supporting #domain Specific #programming in #Web 2.0: a #casestudy of #Smart Devices ( #IoT ).
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The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is described. The detector operates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It was conceived to study proton-proton (and lead-lead) collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV (5.5 TeV nucleon-nucleon) and at luminosities up to 10³⁴ cm⁻² s⁻¹ (10²⁷ cm⁻² s⁻¹). At the core of the CMS detector sits a high-magnetic-field and large-bore superconducting solenoid surrounding an all-silicon pixel and strip tracker, a lead-tungstate scintillating-crystals electromagnetic calorimeter, and a brass-scintillator sampling hadron calorimeter. The iron yoke of the flux-return is instrumented with four stations of muon detectors covering most of the 4π solid angle. Forward sampling calorimeters extend the pseudorapidity coverage to high values (|η| ≤ 5) assuring very good hermeticity. The overall dimensions of the CMS detector are a length of 21.6 m, a diameter of 14.6 m and a total weight of 12500 t.

Key words: Computing, Cloud Computing, Grid Computing, Detector Infrastructure and Safety Systems, Data Acquisition, Trigger, Muon System, Forward Detectors, Hadron Calorimeter, Electromagnetic Calorimeter, Inner Tracking System, Superconducting Magnet

At the time of this paper, the apparatus is essentially completed and installed. After more than 10 years of design and construction, the CMS magnet has been constructed and successfully tested. Most of the magnetic, electrical, mechanical, and cryogenics parameters measured during the tests are in good agreement with calculated values. The CMS magnet is the largest superconducting solenoid ever built for a physics experiment in terms of bending power for physics, total stored energy, and stored energy per unit of cold mass. The silicon-strip inner tracker, with about 200 m2 of active silicon, has been integrated into its support tube, commissioned, and thoroughly tested with cosmic rays. Its performance is excellent, fulfilling the design specifications. The silicon tracker was installed into CMS in december 2007. All the pixel modules are completed; it is planned to install the Pixel detector into CMS in mid-2008. The ECAL, comprising over 75 000 lead tungstate crystals, is the largest crystal calorimeter ever built. The crystals in the barrel part, comprising over 60 000 crystals, have been intercalibrated using cosmic rays and about a third in particle beams, demonstrating the ability to measure the energies ranging from those deposited by minimum ionising particles to high-energy electrons. An energy resolution of 0.5% for 120 GeV electrons has been attained. The ECAL barrel has been installed in the experiment and is being commissioned. The endcaps are foreseen to be inserted into the experiment in 2008. The entire HCAL has been completed and commissioned on the surface. The HCAL modules are currently being commissioned in the experiment proper. The various components of the Muon System (drift tubes, cathode strip chambers, resistive plate chambers) have been completed. A significant fraction of the Muon System has been commissioned and tested on surface with cosmic rays, and it is now being integrated into the experiment and being commissioned in-situ. In the very forward region, the Zero Degree Calorimeter has been completed and CASTOR is expected to be completed in 2008. The off-detector electronics are currently being installed and operations for trigger commissioning are taking place. Common data-acquisition runs with various sub-detectors, sometimes using cosmic rays, are regularly taking place at the experiment and will continue into spring 2008 in anticipation of collisions at LHC in mid-20

A few More pictures:

Full article available at the following link:

The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/3/08/S08004

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The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC
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the CMS Collaboration, The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, Journal of Instrumentation (JINST 3 S08004), 14 August 2008

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Abstract:
Current cloud service offerings, i.e., Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings are often provided as monolithic, one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no room for customization. This limits the ability of Service-based Application (SBA) developers to configure and syndicate offerings from multiple SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers to address their application requirements. Furthermore, combining different independent cloud services necessitates a uniform description format that facilitates the design, customization, and composition. Cloud Blueprinting is a novel approach that allows SBA developers to easily design, configure and deploy virtual SBA payloads on virtual machines and resource pools on the cloud. We propose the Blueprint concept as a uniform abstract description for cloud service offerings that may cross different cloud computing layers, i.e., SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. To support developers with the SBA design and development in the cloud, this paper introduces a formal Blueprint Template for unambiguously describing a blueprint, as well as a Blueprint Lifecycle that guides developers through the manipulation, composition and deployment of different blueprints for an SBA. Finally, the empirical evaluation of the blueprinting approach within an EC’s FP7 project is reported and an associated blueprint prototype implementation is presented.

Key words: Cloud Computing, Service-based Application (SBA), Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Development Methodology

Cloud blueprinting is a novel approach for engineering Service-based Applications (SBAs). Following this approach, developers can create sophisticated SBAs from applications, platforms and infrastructures offered by different providers in the cloud to achieve end-to-end business requirements. This paper has proposed the Blueprintconcept as a uniform, abstract description of cross-layer cloud service offerings, a Blueprint Template for describing the blueprints, and a Blueprint Lifecycle that explains how blueprints are used during all the engineering phases of an SBA.Blueprint has been adopted as one of the main innovative concepts within the EC’s 4caaSt FP7 project. An industry cloud computing case study has been jointly defined by the 4caaSt community and has been used as a running example in this paper to demonstrate our blueprinting approach. The current blueprint XSD template and web-based blueprint prototype is integrated in a joint 4caaSt demonstration. In the future, our vision is to continuously improve the structure of our blueprint template to capture new requirements of SBA development in the cloud. In particular, we will look at other cross-cutting concerns in cloud computing such as security, reliability, pricing, licensing, etc., thanks to the extensible design of the blueprint template that allows adding more blueprint properties. More functionality will also be developed for our blueprint prototype towards a comprehensive blueprint tool that supports the entire SBA development lifecycle and targets the effect of changes in the blueprints and their composition.

Full article available at the following link:

Blueprinting Approach in Support of Cloud Computing https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/4/1/322

Your help in sharing the idea is very welcome!

Blueprinting Approach is a service oriented architecture best practice in Support of #CloudComputing . #Software #Engineering #service
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Cite this paper as:

Nguyen, D.K.; Lelli, F.; Papazoglou, M.P.; Van den Heuvel, W.-J. Blueprinting Approach in Support of Cloud Computing. Future Internet 2012, 4, 322-346.

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Abstract (Engineering Cloud Applications): Recently, Cloud Computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From the IT perspectives, there is a proliferation of methods for cloud application development. Such methods have clearly shown considerable shortcomings to provide an efficient solution to deal with major aspects related to cloud applications. One of these major aspects is the multi-tenancy of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) components used to compose Service-Based Applications (SBAs) on the cloud. Current SaaS offerings are often provided as monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no opportunity for further customization. Monolithic SaaS offerings are more likely to show failure in meeting the business requirements of several consumers. In this paper, we analyze the state-of-the-art of the standardization, methodology, software and product support for SBA development on the cloud, identify some shortcomings, and point out the need of a novel approach for breaking down the monolithic stack of cloud service offerings and providing an effective and flexible solution for SBA designers to select, customize, and aggregate cloud service offerings coming from different providers.

Key words: Cloud Computing, Service-based Application (SBA), Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Development Methodology

The paper provide a survey on existing support for Service-based Application (SBA) development on the cloud. As a summary, the survey has shown that the current cloud solutions are mainly fraught with shortcomings:

• They introduce a monolithic SaaS/PaaS/IaaS stack architecture where a one-size-fits-all mentality prevails. They do not allow SBA developers to mix and match functionalities and services from multiple application, platform and infrastructure providers and configure it dynamically to address their application needs.
• They introduce rigid service orchestration practices tied to a specific resource/infrastructure configuration for the cloud services at the application level.

The above points hamper the (re)-configuration and customization of cloud-based SBAs on demand to reflect evolving inter-organizational collaborations. There is clearly a need to mash up services from a variety of cloud providers to create what has been termed a cloud ecosystem. This type of integration supports the tailoring of SBAs to specific business needs using a mixture of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. To deal with the identified shortcomings, we pointed out the need of an abstract and uniform representation for cloud service offerings across cloud computing layers, i.e. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. By using this uniform description for cloud service offerings, SBA developers can reuse, customize and combine distributed SaaSs for the SBAs in a seamless manner

Full article available at the following link:

http://www.scpe.org/index.php/scpe/article/view/794

PDF version at the following link:

On Engineering Cloud Applications – State of the Art, Shortcomings Analysis and Approach

Your help in sharing the idea is very welcome!

On #Engineering #CloudComputing Applications – State of the Art, Shortcomings Analysis and Approach
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Cite this paper as:

Taher, Y., Nguyen, D. K., Lelli, F., van den Heuvel, W. J. A. M., & Papazoglou, M. (2012). On engineering cloud applications: State of the art, shortcomings analysis, and approach. Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, 13(3), 215-231.

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The project aims to extend the state of the art of computing grid technologies, by introducing the handling of real-time constraints and interactive response into the existing Grid middleware. Our goal is to build a widely distributed system that is able to remotely control and monitor complex instrumentation that ranges from a set of sensors used by geophysical stations monitoring the state of the earth to a network of small power generators to supply a national power grid. These new applications introduce, to the GRID, requirements that are strongly related to the availability of networks where network classes specifically tuned to address such real-time and highly interactive requests are implemented. One of the main objectives of the project is to verify, with real applications running on existing Grid testbeds over both national and international network infrastructures (e.g. GEANT) the feasibility of a Grid-based remote control of systems requiring real-time response. Data acquired from such instruments typically needs to be stored, analysed on-line to compare the data with a given model or to perform some predictions (e.g. meteorological applications). GRIDCC will integrate the proposed “grid of instruments”, or suitable emulators, into existing Grid infrastructures that will provide the computational and storage power needed for the applications. The reference architecture that is proposed here, along with the related software framework, introduces a new concept, that of a “Virtual Instrument Grid Service” (VlGS), which is a service enabling access, through the Grid, to any instrument by providing an appropriate interface on the instrument side. The architecture combines special-purpose services like virtual control rooms, diagnostic and problem-solving services, data-mining services and tele-presence, which are used to support various instruments with existing grid resources like computational farms and databases.

Links:

• EU website of GridCC

If this is not what you are looking for, at this link you can see the full list of projects

The post Grid Enabled Remote Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation (GridCC) appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

Mentor: Francesco Lelli 

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which computer owners donate their computing resources (such as processing power and storage) to one or more “projects”. Successful applications that adopted this technique include SETI@Home [1] and Folding@home [2] 

Toward this idea in this project the candidate will design and implement a generic Workflow plug-in for accessing one of the popular volunteer computing middleware.

The software that will be targeted in this project are JOpera [3] as workflow system and ExtremeWebCH [4] as volunteer computing middleware. At the end of the project a working prototype is expected. 
The purpose of this work is to evaluate the status of the art of these developments proposing new architecture and design guidelines. In addition the candidate will contribute to existing open source projects in order to improve the present tools.

Knowledge and Skills:

Web Programming, Java Programming and basic knowledge of Distribute Applications. 

References:

[1] SETI@Home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home
[2] Folding@home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home 
[3] JOpera http://www.jopera.org/ 
[4] ExtremeWebCH http://www.xtremwebch.net/ 

The post Workflow Support for Volunteer Computing appeared first on Francesco Lelli.