Routes to Sustainability Report

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Project Deliverable

Project Number: Project Acronym: Project Title:

258348 MyFIREMultidisciplinary networking of research communities

in FIRE

Instrument: Thematic Priority

Coordination and support action Future Internet Research and Experiment (FIRE)

Title

D3.3d Routes to sustainability in FIRE some MyFIRE conclusions

Contractual Delivery Date: Actual Delivery Date:

NA 18th May 2012

Start date of project: Duration:

June, 1st 2010 25 Months

Organization name of lead contractor for this deliverable: Document version:

UEdin V1.1

Dissemination level ( Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme)

PU Public XPP Restricted to other programme participants (including the CommissionRE Restricted to a group defined by the consortium (including the Commission)CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission)


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258348 MyFIRE D3.3d Routes to sustainability in FIRE

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Authors (organizations) :

Philip Inglesant (UEdin)

Abstract :

This report is an extra deliverable following on from D3.3 to draw further conclusions about possible paths tosustainability of FIRE, taking an holistic view of FIRE and Future Internet research as a whole. We consider anumber of options including public funding, commercial, and mixed models, and the importance of ademand-driven, high-level federation for the FIRE facilities. The report includes a case study of the BonFIRE Cloudcomputing experimental facility and concludes with a comparison of the FIRE Open Calls process with OpenInnovation.

Keywords :

DisclaimerTHIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITH NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTYOF MERCHANTABILITY, NONINFRINGEMENT, FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR ANY WARRANTY

OTHERWISE ARISING OUT OF ANY PROPOSAL, SPECIFICATION OR SAMPLE. Any liability, including liabilityfor infringement of any proprietary rights, relating to use of information in this document is disclaimed. No

license, express or implied, by estoppels or otherwise, to any intellectual property rights are grantedherein. The members ofthe Multidisciplinary networking of research communities in FIRE (MyFIRE) do

not accept any liability for actions or omissions of MyFIRE members or third parties and disclaims anyobligation to enforce the use of this document. This document is subject to change without notice.


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Revision HistoryThe following table describes the main changes done in the document since it was created.

Revision Date Description Author (Organisation)

V1.0 18th June 2012 Creation Philip Inglesant (UEdin)

V1.1 18th June 2012 Formatting revisions Philip Inglesant (UEdin)


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Table of Content


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1. Executive SummaryThis additional deliverable adds to the findings of D3.3 Exploitation Strategies for Testbeds by looking

more closely at paths to sustainability for FIRE Experimental Facilities. Sustainability is essential not only tomaximise the value return for public funding, but also to ensure that facilities are available for long enough

to enable researchers to plan and perform experiments, and to allow reliability and repeatability. Currently,potential users are deterred from using testbeds if they cannot be sure of this long-term availability. Thisdoes not mean that all facilities must be available indefinitely; termination, where appropriate, is a part ofsustainability. However, the current FP7 funding model does not always provide for FIRE facilities to beavailable for long enough to attract sufficient user interest. Conversely, attracting many more users isclearly a potential route to longer-term sustainability and to increasing the research value of testbeds.The European Commission and the FIRE Architecture Board are well aware of the need for sustainability.Federation of the existing and perhaps new FIRE experimental facilities is seen as a key part of the route tosustainability; the large FIRE facilities projects are already federations of testbeds, but this wider federationis expected to span across FIRE, building on these existing federations. Provision is being made to fundmoves towards this wider high-level federation in the current 2011-12 Information and Communication

Technologies FP7 Work Programme. Federation is planned to include a joint FIRE portal and common toolsproviding features including brokering, user access management, a one-stop-shop, measurement, andperformance analysis. In this way, taking a holistic view of FIRE as a whole, the sustainability of the FIREfeatures, and reliable long-term experimental platforms, is more important than maintaining the specifictestbeds as they currently exist. Indeed, we suggest looking wider than FIRE, such as encouraging use ofFIRE by Future Internet PPP and federation including NRENS and international networks, and programmessuch as the US NSF-finded GENI1, as is already occurring in various ways.Sustainability could be on the basis of a public funding model; although the EU foresees a significant

reduction in its funding, other forms of national, regional, or international funding can play a part.Alternatively, commercial models are possible. Public and commercial models are not exclusive, and weexplore one model from Canada in which public funding was used to provide research facilities for SMEs.

We support our conclusions for FIRE sustainability with a case study of the BonFIRE experimental facility inCloud computing. BonFIRE provides easy-to-use tools for virtual machine management, modelling, lifecyclemanagement, and analytics. For its users, BonFIRE provides the facility for experimental research inemerging issues in Internet-as-a-Service and Internet of Services paradigms. BonFIRE has producedthorough documentation and provides experience-based know-how and support, working with its users,thereby reducing their overall costs. BonFIRE provides heterogeneity and scale beyond that available oncurrent research testbeds, and provides tools for experimental verifiability and reproducibility.BonFIRE developed its offering through three driving experiments which were designed to investigate

research questions of real concern to the Cloud community, and through Open Calls, which providedfunding to support a limited number of experiments (four in the first Open Call) designed to make user ofvarious aspects of the BonFIRE facilities. This approach is leading to a sound offering, meeting the needs of

users, and hence forming the basis for longer-term sustainability within the FIRE federated facilities.Finally, we show how the FIRE model of using Open Calls to grow the user community and to strengthenthe testbeds is related to Open Innovation, in which firms draw on external ideas rather than developingnew ideas internally. Although FIRE is not a commercial firm, it is going beyond the earlier forms of UserInnovation to capture the value created by Open Call experiments and thereby meeting more closely theneeds of its research user base.

1 http://www.geni.net/


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Table of FiguresFigure 1: Timescale of federated FIRE facilities. ............................................................................................ 10Figure 2: Geographically distributed testbeds and testing scenarios. .......................................................... 13Figure 3: BonFIRE Project Timeline: How to get involved. ............................................................................ 14


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2.Introduction2It is clear that to provide a good service for experimenters, and to provide the best value in return forpublic funding, the FIRE programme must be able to sustain the availability of experimental facilitiesthroughout the lifecycle; the FP7 ICT work programme for 2011-12 foresees implementing a demand-driven high level federation framework for all FIRE prototype facilities and beyond making the facility self-

sustainable towards 2015 based on credible business models assuming a significant decrease of EU

funding. [12]. Routes to FIRE sustainability have been considered by a Working Paper discussed by the FIREArchitecture Board. Report II of the FIREStation FIRE Roadmap (report I is [18, 19]) is planned to discusssustainability alongside legal and business issues.

2.1. The importance of sustainabilitySustainability is essential not only to ensure a good return on the EU's investment in FIRE, but also toensure the repeatability of experiments, and to enable the development and maintain reproducibility ofexperiments over the long term. Uncertainty around the sustainability of testbeds enormously decreases

the willingness of potential users/experimenters to use such facilities, especially outside the consortiumaround each facility [20]. This does not mean that every facility must continue indefinitely, and inparticular, it does not imply an unviable indefinite reliance on more pubic funding. A more holistic approachis needed, looking at FIRE as a whole, and at the sustainability of each set of features, rather than thespecific testbeds as they currently exist. Indeed, we suggest looking wider than FIRE, such as liaison withFuture Internet PPP, NRENs and GANT, US NSF-funded GENI, and within the Future Internet Assembly; auseful survey of Future Internet-related initiatives is available on the FIRE web site [17].

2 The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Kostas Kavoussanakis and Vegard Engen of the BonFIRE project inpreparing this deliverable.


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3.Challenges towards sustainabilityThe current funding arrangements certainly do not prevent the disappearance of key parts of the FIREinfrastructure, and it is recognised, by the FIRE Architecture Board and others, that the existing FP7 funding

model does not ensure the sustainability of FIRE facilities for long enough to attract sufficient interest inusers and research projects and to establish a large enough user base.Faced with these challenges, it is possible to identify two general routes towards sustainability: what mightbe called the public-funding and the commercial routes. Unfortunately, there is a tension between thesetwo approaches; focussing on one approach may tend to weaken the other, threatening the overallsustainability of the projects.

3.1. Public fundingIn this approach, the experimental facility has as its main objective to allow researchers to conductadvanced experimentation, where the users are mainly research labs (in academia and industry) anduniversities, with the funding coming mainly from public authorities. Within this we can include European

Commission research funding but also national and regional funding.

3.1.1. Open Call funding for experimental researchA very significant and innovative approach, where funding for the use of experimental facilities does notflow from users in a commercial model, but rather, funding is included in the budget allocated to the

service provider to support experimenters, has been pioneered by the FIRE second wave facilities projects.A proportion (20%) of the EU funding for each of these projects was set aside for the purpose of these OpenCalls, and additional funding to extension of the facilities.We discuss Open Calls as used by FIRE, and also now in other initiatives, in section 5 as a form of OpenInnovation.

3.2. Commercial and other sources of incomeIn this approach, sustainability is achieved through a commercial business model, where users pay to usethe facility. Although this is a traditional business model, there are of course many varieties of ways inwhich is may be made viable. The facility may even become privately owned and operated, or operate as apart-private consortium. Support for SMEs (perhaps as part of a funded service/experiment) could be a keypart of this strategy. Whether or not this approach is taken as a whole, FIRE encourages collaborationbetween research and industry [15]. BonFIRE, along with PanLab and others, has considered this as onepossible approach.

3.3. Public funding of commercial use: a model from Canada

Conversely, another possible model is for public funding to enable testbeds to be made available to smalland medium enterprises, which would find it challenging or unaffordable to build their own costly R&Denvironments. This is the approach taken by Canadas innovative DAIR/ATIR Digital Accelerator for

Innovation and Research [7], a Cloud-based project of CANARIE, Canadas Advanced Research andInnovation Network3.The objective in the initial phase was to reduce significantly the time required to design, prototype, validateand demonstrate new products and ideas, particularly at large scale. It also reduced capital, space, powerand people resources that each company would otherwise be required to provide over the course of theproduct development cycle [8]: to let technology entrepreneurs do what they do best without having tobuild a dedicated R&D environment [7]. A $CAN 3 million pilot project from spring 2011 was fullysubscribed; during this pilot phase, there were no charges for the use of DAIR. It is expected that DAIR will

3 http://canarie.ca/


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progress to large-scale deployment during 2012 and beyond; in this stage, there may be some cost recoveryfrom commercial enterprises, depending on demand [8]. Thus, the model is of public funding for researchresources, but not necessarily for these resources to always be provided free of charge.

3.4. State aid for research to development and innovation

The EU is aware of the risk that state aid for Research, Development, and Innovation can distortcompetition, crowding out private investment, supporting inefficient production, or strengtheningincumbent market power [11]. These negative effects likely to be stronger in activities that are closer tocommercialisation of the product or the service. Recognising this, EU rules state that aid intensity should belower for activities linked to development and innovation than for more fundamental research-relatedactivities. At the same time, the EU is aware of the need for state aid in appropriate cases to addressmarket failure, a traditional justification for public intervention. Moreover, there has been a move awayfrom assessment based on the linear distinction of the different stages of research activities [14]. Thus,there is no clear separation between the public funding and commercial approaches, or between close

to market and basic research; public funding can be provided for commercial research anddevelopment, while academic facilities can be used by commercial companies, where appropriate.

3.5. Opening up FIRE testbedsA related practice, sometimes more informal and perhaps on a smaller scale, involves the use byresearchers commercial, research-based, or academicof funded facilities on as as-is, best-effort basis.This practice can widen the user base of testbeds at little cost to the testbed operators. OFELIA, forexample, is currently available and is being used on such a basis, in addition to the Open Call experiments.More generally, FIRE aims ultimately to become self-sustainable towards 2015, based on credible businessmodels assuming a significant decrease of EU funding [13], by virtue of demand-led, high-level federation,as we discuss in section 4.1. , maintaining openness towards additional testbeds and facilities, building onproven existing federation models, supporting the use of open standards, and linking with existing researchinfrastructures such as Gant and the NRENS, and for co-operation around the EU, nationally, and

internationally.In these ways, the public funding and commercial models are in some ways overlapping. Indeed, if the

tension between the two approaches can be overcome then possibly a facility could establish sufficientsustainability.


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4.Long-term sustainability of infrastructure4.1. Integrated FIRE federation

Alongside the public funded and commercial approaches, and overarching both of them, FIRE has hadthe aim to strengthen sustainability by combining resources in an efficient, more soundly-based way as acommon set of federated testbeds since at least the 2009 report of the Working Group on modularfederation of FIRE Facilities [10].From the socio-economic viewpoint, federation is attractive, and may present legal and businessadvantages in terms of management and enabling potential users to enter into one single agreement.From a technical point of view, the vision of a user accessing resources as needed, or accessing through asingle centralising portal [10], and easily running experiments on heterogeneous environments, ischallenging and presents many complications. Amongst of the issues, this implies the need for FIRE willneed to put effort into standardised interfaces and interoperability; the current EU ICT FP7 WorkProgramme includes development of this portal, alongside a set of common tools addressing issues such as

brokering, user access management, measurement and performance analysis [12].However, federation can take many different forms: it is in essence a generic term for a higher level ofinterconnectivity, interoperability and interworking between testbeds. The federation Working Group [10]identified horizontal federation giving greater scale across a narrow range of layers of the telecom stack and vertical federation enabling system-level testing across layers, or in a layer-less model.Federation could also be considered to extend to include the sharing or exchange of test-bed related tools,as a form of software federation, or even human federation through the exchange of students and

researchers. A common portal, or one-stop shop, is considered to be a basic FIRE requirement by thefederation Working Group.Federation should extend outside FIRE, and is extending, with more or less established links between FIREfacilities and NRENS, Gant, and internationally, for example with the US GENI facilities.

Nevertheless, fundamentally a federation represents a common set of objectives; without this, a federationis meaningless [10].

4.1.1. Generic interdisciplinary platformsIn parallel, and not necessarily within the FIRE programme, there have been suggestions about providinggeneric platforms, providing the basic elements of a Future Internet infrastructure: network-, storage-,computing-, service-, or content-related, along with middle ware, tools, and core services. The federationWorking Group [10] suggested that such generic projects might appear in EC ICT programmes as early as2010 or 2011; to the best of our knowledge, however, this is currently manifested mostly through the FI-PPP programme (see, for example, Technology foundation: Future Internet Core Platform Objective FI.ICT-2011.1.7 [13]), rather than in specifically experimental, basic research.

Figure 1: Timescale of federated FIRE facilities. Source [19]:


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4.2. Multiple funding streamsIn practice, the FIRE facilities - but not necessarily the experiments using them - operate as part oflongstanding research centres in universities, research arms of large firms, and specialised companies.These centres do not in general rely on a single funding stream, but on a combination of European,national, university-internal and, to some extent, commercial sources. Although this does not provide

complete assurance of the continued availability of FIRE infrastructure and should certainly not be reliedupon to do so, it does provide an additional level of safety so that, at least, it can be hoped that thehardware and, most importantly, the human knowledge built up during FIRE and before is not dissipated.The FIRE Architecture board has considered that FP7 and national funding sources, currently disparate andsometimes contradictory, could be aligned in some way.

4.1. Sustainability of other FIRE facilitiesIt can be noted in Figure 1 that the former FIRE facilities did not cease (although there may have beenfunding gaps in some cases), but were in various ways largely incorporated, along with other facilities andtechnologies such as Grid, into the growing FIRE federation.An indication of the realistic possibilities of bringing together existing testbeds to further strengthen themand to increase sustainability is provided by the OpenLab project4, which "brings together the essentialingredients for an open, general purpose and sustainable large scale shared experimental facility, ....".OpenLab builds on the first wave FP7 ICT Call 2 FIRE projects Onelab 2 and Panlab II, both in themselvescontinuations of earlier projects, and, with FEDERICA, extended beyond their original EU-fundedcontractual end date [20].In this way, the sustainability of projects as they become parts of new projects is illustrated. Another goodexample is provided by the experiment ExSec - Experimenting Scalability of Continuous SecurityMonitoring, running as part of the first BonFIRE Open Call. This experiment is in some ways an extension ofwork done in the FP6 GridTrust project, which developed a framework to perform continuous securitymonitoring on Grid technologies, and of the FP7 project RESERVOIR5, which adapted a portion of thisframework for the policy-based access control to Cloud technologies. But indicating the ways in whichFIRE facilities enable increased scale and diversity - The ExSec experiment aims to perform a much morerigorous scalability test, including different types of hypervisors and different types of Cloud environmentmanagers, for applications requiring continuous security monitoring.

4.2. Towards Horizon 2020Although FP7 ends in 2013, it is already clear that Future Internet Experimental platforms will continue intothe forthcoming Horizon 2020 programme. Indeed, the FIRE federation has been scheduled to run to atleast late 2015, which continues into the Horizon 2020 duration. A workshop to be held in November 2012will showcase results from engineering aspects of Future Internet best practices and experimentalapproaches to tackling the societal Grand Challenges of Horizon 2020, and the FP7 OSIRIS project6 (Towards

an Open and Sustainable ICT Research Infrastructure Strategy) is organizing a high level strategic event on"The role of ICT research infrastructures in Horizon 2020".

4

http://www.ict-openlab.eu/5 http://www.reservoir-fp7.eu/6 http://www.osiris-online.eu/index.htm


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5.Case study: BonFIREBonFIRE is a "multi-site cloud facility for applications, services and systems research and experimentation"[5, 22]. As such, it goes to the heart of Europe's vision of the Future Internet, supporting experimentation

of the Internet of Services. BonFIRE testbeds are provided using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivery,with BonFIRE providing some additional features on top of them (though a complete Platform as a Serviceoffering is not in scope for BonFIRE).BonFIRE explicitly has to make the testbed sustainable after the end of the project among its objectives[24].

5.1. Benefits of BonFIREFor its users, BonFIRE offers easy-to-use tools and services to support cloud federation, virtual machinemanagement, service modelling, experiment lifecycle management, quality of service monitoring andanalytics.Why should an experimenter, or other user, use BonFIRE rather than existing public cloud offerings?

BonFIRE offers something different, beyond what is provided by these commercial providers: Heterogeneous resources Advanced low-level control and monitoring APIs Scale beyond current research testbeds Experimental tools for verifiability and reproducibility, notably standard (Open Virtualization

Framework (OVF)7) and domain-specific experiment descriptorsBonFIRE is for innovative experiments and works closely with its users to support their requirements;ultimately, using BonFIRE will reduce costs by freeing researchers to focus on innovation, rather thantestbed operations [2].

5.2. Heterogeneous but seamlessBonFIRE currently comprises six geographically distributed testbeds across Europe, which offerheterogeneous Cloud resources, including compute, storage and networking [4]. BonFIRE exposes acommon cloud interface for the management and monitoring of the virtual resources, based on the OpenCloud Computing Interface8. This is an open, community-led RESTful protocol and API for all kinds ofresource management tasks. OCCI has evolved into a flexible API with a strong focus on interoperabilitywhile still offering a high degree of extensibility [25].In BonFIRE there are three sorts of underlying infrastructure. They are as follows:

OpenNebula-based9: provided by BonFIRE sites at The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom(EPCC), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, France (INRIA),Universitt Stuttgart, Germany (USTUTT-HLRS).

Virtual Wall, provided by Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, Belgium (IBBT)

10

;and

Cells11, provided by Hewlett-Packard Labs, United Kingdom (HP).These testbeds also expose an OCCI interface, but this is not available to the user. The user interacts withthe BonFIRE OCCI-based interface, which hides minor technical differences of the site OCCI, while stillexposing site-specific functionality. The BonFIRE OCCI interface and the differences between testbeds aredescribed, amongst other information, in detail in the very helpful BonFIRE User Documentation [3].

7 http://www.dmtf.org/standards/ovf8 http://occi-wg.org/9

http://www.opennebula.org/start. OpenNebula is an open-source project developing the industry standard solution

for building and managing virtualized enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructures10 http://www.ibbt.be/en/develop-test/ilab-t/virtual-wall11 http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/cloud_collaboration/projects.html


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Figure 2: Geographically distributed testbeds and testing scenarios.

Source: http://www.bonfire-project.eu/infrastructure

5.2.1. Built by service providers for service providersThere is often a pre-conception that outsourcing entails loss of control, and compromises on quality andreliability. As an example of the forward thinking of BonFIRE as it strives to build an attractive environmentfor users, BonFIRE is built by service providers for service providers [2]. The BonFIRE consortium alsoincorporates many years experience in Cloud and earlier technologies.

Unlike existing commodity Cloud services, BonFIRE is working with its users in consultation, to ensure thatexperimental hypothesis, design and execution all work in harmony. By allowing researchers to focus oninnovation rather than testbed operations echoing the thinking behind support for SMEs by CanadasDAIR programme BonFIRE will reduce costs for its users, and enable them to achieve their results morequickly and efficiently. BonFIRE is also easy to use, with an API which allows users to control and monitorexperiments at a much more controllable level than would otherwise be possible. This API is also exposedthrough a Portal, a domain-specific experiment descriptor and, from summer 2012, the OVF OpenVirtualisation Format12 language. Monitoring data are exposed through the Zabbix13 monitoring framework;these data uniquely include infrastructure (i.e. physical host), virtual machine and application metrics.BonFIRE also focusses on control: this is delivered through controlled emulated networks at the Virtual Wallsite; controlled placement of VMs on specific sites and specific physical hosts on specific sites; and exclusive

access to physical hosts. Bandwidth on demand, based on the GANT AutoBAHN14 facility and controllednetwork routing as available from the FEDERICA15 experimental facility will also feature on BonFIRE later in2012.In this way, BonFIRE should have a sound basis for long-term sustainability, not only in itself but as part of awider FIRE federation.BonFIRE will offer Open Access to the research community at large later in 2012; access will require vettingof the experimentation targets, with each request for access evaluated on a case-by-case basis considering

12 http://www.dmtf.org/standards/ovf13 http://www.zabbix.com/ an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks andapplications14

http://www.geant.net/service/autobahn/15 http://www.fp7-federica.eu/ Federated E-infrastructure Dedicated to European ResearchersInnovating in Computing network Architecture


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business, infrastructure, quality and coverage impact, and contractual agreements will be establishedbetween parties as necessary. In this way, access to BonFIRE is developing in three stages: 1) DrivingExperiments, 2) Open Call Experiments and 3) from later in 2012, controlled Open Access.

Figure 3: BonFIRE Project Timeline: How to get involved. Source: http://www.bonfire-project.eu/involved

5.3. Initial use cases: the Driving Experiments To help to ensure that the BonFIRE facility remains state-of-the-art and applicable to the challenges facingresearchers, the BonFIRE project developed in the early stages three driving experiments, which posedreal research challenges in Cloud computing and acted as examples to push forward the facilityrequirements, development and operations.In the emerging Cloud and Infrastructure as a Service models, offering services to a commercial standardraises new questions about measuring and ensuring Quality of Service and service provision; these issuesare the focus of some of the driving experiments undertaken as part of the BonFIRE project. In this way,these early experiments have a double advantage; not only do they raise the quality of the testbed offering,but they also start to envisage ways in which the service can be made ready for to support a wider user

community.

5.3.1. Driving Experiment 1: Effective Cloud Software TestingExperiment 1, in which the partners were SAP and HP Labs, addressed the real business problem ofsoftware quality, which is more complex in Cloud. Although Cloud platforms are the clear candidate as abusiness choice to develop new applications exploiting the Internet to conduct transactions, Cloudapplications are more complex than traditional ones due to the cloud paradigm novelty and as aconsequence it is more difficult to test them effectively. Software testing and quality managementconsume 30% - 50% of development budget according to a recent survey [1]. Therefore, organizations thathave high software quality requirements and expectations might struggle to perform adequate system,performance and security tests on such applications.

The BonFIRE infrastructure was shown to be a viable solution to this issue. In this experiment, a blueprintfor cloud-based software testing based on business and technical criteria (i.e. ease of use, controllability,observability, predictability, repeatability, reliability, availability and cost effectiveness) was defined. On theone hand BonFIRE facilitated this definition, and on the other hand the experiment validated BonFIRE andprovided feedback in order for BonFIRE to be a cloud-based software testing facility.

5.3.2. Driving Experiment 2: QoS-Oriented Service Engineering for FederatedClouds

This experiment, carried out by IT Innovation at the University of Southampton, focuses on enablingefficient service engineering tools for modelling, analysing and planning Quality of Service (QoS) for servicebased applications deployed within federated Clouds. Today, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) QoS

offerings are expressed in low-level terms (e.g. CPU speed, disk space, etc). Their customers, typicallyapplication users, are often interested in application-level parameters because the application is the thing


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that gives the customer the value (e.g. CFD simulation or video rendering). Therefore, the gap between theterms the Infrastructure provider offers and what the users really want is large which results in a complexrelationship between application performance and resource parameters. The complexity of thisrelationship is increased for applications deployed across federated clouds where even low-level resourcedescriptions may differ due to lack of standardisation.

The research questions for the experiment include: Does the expression of IaaS parameters in terms ofapplication-class benchmarks simplify the creation of application-level QoS that can be easily understoodby users, whilst being usable for application modelling to predict application performance? How doesspecification of QoS in application-level terms provide efficiencies for users and providers in a servicemarketplace?In this way, the experiment not only addresses the specific research challenges detailed above, but alsoprovides a concrete exemplar scenario where results from Cloud research project can exploit FIRE, and cango beyond what is possible within the current project and provide driving requirements for the FIRE facility,and addressing a very urgent business requirement.This experiment produced useful results which have led to several publications [6, 23, 26].

5.3.3.Driving Experiment 3: Elasticity Requirement for Cloud-Based Applications

The third driving experiment, carried out by Atos, addresses a real business problem - how to provideresources efficiently, under extremes of changing conditions, especially in Infrastructure as a Serviceplatforms? This is an important problem because while the current Cloud approach is very appealing forusers, with pay-per-use and scalability, it is a problem for providers to maintain a sound model.The target of the experiment is to determine experimentally the elasticity requirements for cloud basedweb applications, to help providers to comfortably keep within SLA levels, without excessive over-provisioning of resources.To achieve this goal, in a first phase the experiment stressed web applications with different load patternsand different provisioned infrastructures. The scalability policies were verified in a second phase, bystudying their behaviour under changing loads.

5.4. Expanding the user community: Open CallsAs with the other second wave and later FIRE facility projects, BonFIRE made use of an Open Call process toexpand its user base and strengthen its offering. As well as being able to use the infrastructure as earlyusers, chosen experiments are funded at up to around 200,000 each, a total of1340k over two such calls.The application process was a simple one-stage process, with experiments lasting around 12 months.The first Open Call closed on 9th March 2011. The second open call closed on 7th March 2012, and theresults were not available at the time of writing this deliverable.The interest for the BonFIRE Project in the open call experiments is in the use and improvement of theBonFIRE facility, however the selected experiments nevertheless pursue sound research results. Thus, theoverall aims of the Open Call are to extend the BonFIRE user community; to identify new functionality in

response to researchers requirements; to identify areas for improvement in correct functioning andperformance; and to get feedback on the operation and usability of the facility. Further details about theOpen Call process can be found on the FIRE web site [16]. And, ultimately, on this basis, to develop a facilitywhich is able to attract a good number of users, deliver innovation and become sustainable.

5.4.1. Results of first BonFIRE Open CallThe first Open Call exceeded the best expectation of the BonFIRE team, attracting 28 proposals. Of these,four were selected for funding:


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5.4.2. TurboCloud - two SMEs towards what could be a real productTurboCloud is a very promising collaboration with two Irish SMEs, which combines two complementarytechnology platforms: the Cloudium16 Chipset enables server-based desktop virtualisation, while theRedzinc17 Virtual Path Slice controller enables dynamic virtual path slices to deliver a right of way across theInternet without interference from unwanted traffic. Both technologies are in beta development stage.

The hypothesis for this experiment is that by combining virtual path slice technology with server-baseddesktop virtualisation, a satisfactory user experience can be achieved especially where multimediaapplications are used.This experiment therefore represents an innovative collaboration between complementary technologies; aclose collaboration with the SME sector; and a relatively close-to-market development project. It hasreceived favourable high-profile press coverage [27]. If similar usage can be established for BonFIRE inlarger numbers, this represents a sound route towards eventual sustainability.For the three other experiments from the first Open Call, a notable facet is the extent to which they drawon, and extend, earlier experiments. In this way, not only are these earlier experiments sustained, and areable to lead to further research, but also BonFIRE is assured of the usefulness of these experiments in theirown right.

5.4.3. VCOC buiding on eIMRTThe main objective of the VCOC (Virtual Clusters on federated sites) experiment is to evaluate the feasibilityof using multiple Cloud environments to deploy Services which need the allocation of a large pool of CPUsor virtual machines to a single user.This experiment is run by CESGA18, and builds on CESGAs earlier eIMRT19 project because it uses anapplication which calculates the dose for radiotherapy treatments based on Monte Carlo methods, as anexample to trial these services. The experiment is concerned with the time to deployment and enlargementof such clusters alongside the influence of other simultaneous operations in the process; that is, themanagement of these virtual clusters. A second concern is the usage of the distributed capability of Cloudproviders in order to protect the service against failures.

On BonFIRE, this experiment benefits from controllability over parameters such as network parameterssuch as bandwidth, latency or packet loss; in-depth monitoring of factors in a way which is not possible in acommercial Cloud; and experiment descriptors reducing the effort by the experimenters to set up the testenvironment. Moreover, exploiting BonFIREs unique characteristics, it can do this on a multi -siteenvironment, and thereby gain very valuable information about how to deploy and manage virtual clustersacross several sites.In return, VCOC has user-tested most of the components of the BonFIRE infrastructure, including thedetection of performance bottlenecks, and in addition it helped to improve the final user experience. VCOChas made a large number of new requests from the project, and their implementation is an excellentexample of genuinely user-led innovation.

5.4.4. ExSec: Experimenting Scalability of Continuous Security Monitoring building on GridTrust & RESERVOIR

The ExSec experiment aims to determine an empirically validated elasticity function for securitymonitoring; this is continuous security monitoring and therefore has the potential to impact negatively onsystem performance.ExSec is let by CETIC20, an applied research centre which specialises in the area of ICT, particularly intechnology transfer with SMEs.

16 http://www.cloudiumsystems.com/17

http://www.redzinc.net/18

http://www.cesga.es/19 http://eimrt.cesga.es/ Advanced Systems for Radiotherapy Planning Using Distributed Computation20 http://www.cetic.be/


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From the point of view of sustainability going into BonFIRE, this experiment is an extension of work done inthe FP6 GridTrust project, which developed a framework to perform continuous security monitoring onGrid technologies, and of the FP7 project RESERVOIR21, which adapted a portion of this framework for thepolicy-based access control to Cloud technologies. However, only small-scale security tests with a handfulof virtual machines (and grid nodes) were performed during GridTrust and RESERVOIR. The ExSec

experiment aims to perform a much more rigorous scalability test, including different types of hypervisorsand different types of Cloud environment managers, for applications requiring continuous securitymonitoring in the cloud. Testing and validating at this scale and rigour requires that experiments are run ona real large-scale heterogeneous Cloud infrastructure, together with technical solutions and a strong level ofsupport, such as is provided by BonFIRE.It is worth noting here, as example of sustainability and influential innovation, that the RESERVOIR projectpaved the way for a number of current European projects, including BonFIRE among others. Amongsuccessful outcomes were OpenNebula, maintaining openness and open source in Cloud computing.Indeed, BonFIRE uses and also contributes to OpenNebula.The ExSec experiment will benefit the research partner, CETIC, not only through the experimental results,but also by enabling CETIC to build its skills in cloud computing and to extend its consulting services in

distributed systems security. The results of ExSec experiment will enable CETIC to help businesses inidentifying the best security architecture that will fit their Cloud architectures and performancerequirements. For BonFIRE, ExSec provides a way of testing and validating much-needed tools formonitoring the security properties of heterogeneous federated Cloud deployments, and in terms ofinfrastructural improvements, feedback through hands-on testing, and sharing of security-relatedknow-how.

5.4.5. TEOS: Testing Optimisation for Service EcosystemsThe Testing Optimisation for Service Ecosystems project, led by the Service Systems Design Group at theUniversity of Manchester22, aims to determine the conditions for achieving resilient and optimal servicecompositions on a distributed cloud infrastructure for the Future Internet. This experiment will deploy and

test two service optimization models, characterized as global optimization and local optimization. The"global optimization" model is of interest from the point of view of sustainability, because it was developedin the FP7 SOA4All project23.TEOS aims to determine ways in which both optimization models can be distributed and deployed onmulti-site Cloud, and test their performance. The multi-site computational and storage resources providedby BonFIRE represent an ideal platform for testing the two optimisation models in various configurations,and for testing in real-world scenarios.For BonFIRE, the TEOS experiments are designed to evaluate the various facilities and features of BonFIRE,such as the ability of the infrastructure to cope with dynamisms of service ecosystem, elasticity, cross-sitecommunication between components and dynamic management of Virtual Machines; and will develop andtest mechanisms such as dynamic management of experiments.

21

http://www.reservoir-fp7.eu/22 https://research.mbs.ac.uk/service-research/23 http://www.soa4all.eu/


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6.Open Calls and Open InnovationOpen Access and the increasingly significant topic of Open Innovation [9] are emerging as importantthemes for Future Internet research, not only in Living Labs (for example, Botnia24 is a partner in the TEFIS

facility project) and Smart Cities such as Smart Santander25

, where they have a clear and long-standingrecognition, but also in experimentation at lower levels where the "users" are experimental researchers,and where formal and informal interactions between service users and service providers are being activelyencouraged.In Open Innovation, expertise is not all sought within the firm, but rather, external resources, companies,and experts are drawn into the business model. Open Innovation is related to User Innovation [30] and toInnofusion [21], but is concerned more with value capture, whereas User Innovation is more interested invalue creation. FIRE is not, of course, a commercial firm, but is nevertheless capturing the value frominnovation by experimenters, as well as helping to create value through strengthening the testbeds, and, inOpen Calls, is a very open form oforganisation.

6.1. Open Calls and sustainabilityAll of the FIRE facility (IP) projects in the second and later waves of FIRE (IPs) have made use of aninnovative Open Calls process to enlarge their user community, strengthen their set of use cases, hardenthe testbed offering through identification of gaps and problems, and define user-led new functionality.Whether or not explicitly stated, the ideas behind Open Innovation are influential in the thinking behindthis Open Calls process. This is innovative innovation [28]: it is not simply that there is innovation itself acomplex topic, and the ultimate driver of FIRE and other FP7 research in the longer term; there is alsoinnovation in theprocesses of innovation.For example, the detailed announcement for the TEFIS open call in March 2011 [29] is clear about the threeobjectives of the call; the call information for the other projects issuing calls contains similar objectives:The TEFIS Open Call will:

Incorporate a set of experiments to run tests orchestrated across multiple andheterogeneous testbeds

Support the technical activities of the TEFIS project by providing feedback about the use ofthe platform and new functionalities that would be interesting to include in future versions

Support the dissemination activities of the project by providing use case examplesThus, the overall aims of the Open Call are, in addition to providing rigorous research outputs, to extendthe user community and dissemination; to identify new functionality in response to researchers

requirements; to identify areas for improvement in correct functioning and performance; and to getfeedback on the operation and usability of the facility [16]. And, ultimately, on this basis, to develop afacility which is able to attract a good number of users and become self-sustaining.

As well as being able to use the infrastructure as early users, chosen experiments are funded at up to200,000 each. The application process was a simple one-stage process. These experimental projects areintended to be small one or two consortium partners and quite short in duration, with experimentslasting around 12 months.

24 http://www.openlivinglabs.eu25 http://www.smartsantander.eu/


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7.ConclusionsFIRE is developing mechanisms towards sustainability not only of its own infrastructure but, equallyimportantly, of the knowledge, "know-how" as human knowledge, experiences with developing Cloud and

other Future Internet computing, and experimental results. These experimental results, and theexperiences of running them, in turn, are increasing the European skill set in Future Internet in researchcentres, industry, and SMEs.


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8.References1.

Ballou, M.-C. Improving Software Quality to Drive Business Agilityhttp://www.coverity.com/library/pdf/IDC_Improving_Software_Quality_June_2008.pdf Accessed04/06/2012

2. BonFIRE Project. BonFIRE Cloud Quarterly - Issue 01: September 2010 http://www.bonfire-project.com/sites/default/files/bonfire-cloud-quarterly-Issue1-Sept10.pdf

3. BonFIRE Project. BonFIRE User Documentation Release 2.0 http://doc.bonfire-project.eu/R2/BonFIRE.pdf

4. BonFIRE: Infrastructure http://www.bonfire-project.eu/infrastructure Accessed5. Supporting Innovation in an Internet of Services http://www.bonfire-project.eu/innovation

Accessed6. Bouckaert, S., Vanhie-Van Gerwen, J., Moerman, I., Phillips, S. C., Wilander, J., Ur Rehman, S.,

Dabbous, W. and Turletti, T. Benchmarking computers and computer networks. 2011.7. CANARIE. DAIR: Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research/ATIR: lAcclrateur technologique

pour linnovation et la recherche http://canarie.ca/templates/news/docs/DAIR.pdf8. DAIR Pilot Program http://canarie.ca/en/dair-program/overviewhttp://canarie.ca/en/dair-

program/overview Accessed 04/06/20129. Chesborough, H. W. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from

Technology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA, 2003.10.Crowcroft, J., Demeester, P., Magen, J., Tran-Gia, P. and Wilander, J. Towards a collaboration and

high-level federation structure for the FIRE Facility ("Wise Men" report). 2009.11.European Commission Community Framework for State Aid for Research and Development and

Innovation: 2006/C 323/01. 2006.12.European Commission. Information and Communication Technologies Updated Work Programme

2011 and Work Programme 2012. 2011.13.European Commission. Information and Communication Technologies Work Programme 2011-12.

2011.14.European Commission Mid-Term Review of the R&D&I Framework: Commission Staff Working

Paper: Brussels 10.08.2011. 2011.15.FIRE: Future Internet Research and Experimentation. FIRE White Paperhttp://www.ict-

fireworks.eu/fileadmin/documents/FIRE_White_Paper_2009_v3.1.pdf Accessed 12 March 201116.1st FIRE "Open Calls" information day http://www.ict-fire.eu/events/other-fire-events/1st-fire-

open-calls-information-day.html Accessed17.List of initiatives / actions of interest to FIRE http://www.ict-fire.eu/home/fire-related-

initiatives.html Accessed 17/06/201218.FIREStation. FIRE Roadmap Report I - Part II: Deliverable D3.5 http://www.ict-

fire.eu/fileadmin/publications/deliverables/D3_5_FIRE_Roadmap_II_02122011_v1_0.pdf19.FIREStation. FIRE Roadmap: Deliverable D3.4 http://www.ict-

fire.eu/fileadmin/publications/deliverables/D3_4-pu-Common_roadmap_of_FIRE_test_facilities_%E2%80%93_First_version_v1.0.pdf

20.FIREStation. 1st FIRE Portfolio Update Concept of Experimentally-Driven Research and itsFacilities. Deliverable D2.1. 2011.

21.Fleck, J. Innofusion or diffusation? : the nature of technological development in robotics. Universityof Edinburgh, 1988.

22.Hume, A., Al-Hazmi, Y., Belter, B., Campowsky, K., Carril, L. M., Carrozzo, G., Engen, V., Prez, D. G.,Ponsat, J. J., Kbert, R., Liang, Y., Rohr, C. and Seghbroeck, G. V. BonFIRE: A Multi-cloud Test Facility

for Internet of Services Experimentation. In TridentCom 2012 (Thessaloniki, Greece, 11/06/2012,2012).


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23.Marquezan, C. C., Metzger, A., Pohl, K., Engen, V., Boniface, M., Phillips, S. C. and Zlatev, Z. AdaptiveFuture Internet Applications: Opportunities and Challenges for Adaptive Web Services TechnologyAdaptive Web Services for Modular and Reusable Software Development: Tactics and Solution.,2012.

24.Martrat, J. BonFIRE: Presentation to FIRE open calls info day, Brussels, February 9th, 2011http://www.ict-fire.eu/fileadmin/events/2010-02-1OpenCall/FIRE_Open_Calls_Info_Day_9_Feb_2011_-_BonFIRE.pdf

25.Open Grid Forum Open Cloud Computing Interface - Core. GFD-P-R.183 version 1.1. 2011.26.Phillips, S. C., Engen, V. and Papay, J. Snow White Clouds and the Seven Dwarfs. In IEEE 3rd

International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, CloudCom 2011 (Athens,Greece, 29/11/2011-01/12/2011, 2011).

27.Richardson, D. Irish firms receive lucrative cloud technology contracts. 2011.28.Seely Brown, J. Foreword Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from

Technology H. W. Chesborough Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA, 2003.29.TEFIS project.Announcement of a competitive call to select new experiments for the TEFIS project

http://www.tefisproject.eu/media/upload/Detailed-Call-information_TEFIS-final1.pdf

30.von Hippel, E. The Sources of Innovation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA,1988.

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