Contrail - Converging Clouds
Supply and demand for computational capacity is elastic. Some companies are falling short, others have capacity in abundance. More often than not the need or surplus in computational power or storage capacity is temporary. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the surplus of one corporation could (temporarily) alleviate the shortage of the other? Today, a consortium of ten organisations from six European countries started on a collaborative project to enable just that. The Contrail project aims to design, implement, evaluate and promote an open source computational cloud wherein users can limitless share resources. What seems simple is in fact a huge challenge. Suppliers and users of computer capacity already have fast Internet connections. But in future, systems will have to communicate seamlessly with one another, despite running different software on various platforms. The workload has to be distributed proportionally, data must be at the owners’ disposition and very well secured at all times. Accessibility and interoperability are both of great importance. In finding answers to these and many other issues, ten organisations from six European countries are collaborating in the Contrail consortium. The project will run for a period of three years and will show tangible results: 1. Contrail will provide a complete Cloud platform, which integrates a full Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offer. 2. Contrail will allow Cloud providers to seamlessly integrate resources from other Clouds with their own infrastructure. 3. Contrail will break the current customer lock-in situation by allowing live application migration from one cloud to another. 4. Contrail will be fully available in open-source. Christine Morin, head of the Myriads research team at INRIA Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique, is the coordinator of the whole project. Myriads team members continue their research based of the results from the EC-funded XtreemOS project that has just come to an end. The objective of MYRIADS is to design and implement systems and environments for autonomous service and resource management in distributed virtualized infrastructures. The team tackles the challenges of dependable application execution and efficient resource management in the future Internet of Services. In the Framework of the Contrail project, experiments will be performed on the Grid 5000 platform managed by INRIA and consisting of more than 7000 cores distributed on 11sites in France an abroad Contrail is an open infrastructure in a homogeneous computer cloud, in which participants can seamlessly share their computer capacities. It could induce a giant economic impulse. Hence the EU’s contribution of 8.3 million Euros to the project’s budget of 11.5 million Euros.
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France