D5.3.

1 Collaboration Report
2012-10-31

Angelos Yannopoulos (ICCS), Athanasios Voulodimos (ICCS), Michael Boniface (IT Innovation), David Salama Osborne (ATOS)

This deliverable describes the collaboration activities undertaken by the project during the 1st year, providing a record of the work done and the planned activities during year 2.

www.experimedia.eu

EXPERIMEDIA

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Project acronym EXPERIMEDIA Full title Experiments in live social and networked media experiences Grant agreement number 287966 Funding scheme Large-scale Integrating Project (IP) Work programme topic Objective ICT-2011.1.6 Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) Project start date 2011-10-01 Project duration 36 months Activity 5 Legal, sustainability and promotion Workpackage 5.3 Collaboration Deliverable lead organisation ICCS Authors Angelos Yannopoulos (ICCS) Athanasios Voulodimos (ICCS) Michael Boniface (IT Innovation) David Salama Osborne (ATOS) Reviewers Stephen C. Phillips (IT Innovation) Version 1.0 Status Final Dissemination level PU: Public Due date PM12 (2012-09-30) Delivery date 2012-10-31

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Table of Contents
1. 2. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 3 Collaboration in the context of FIRE ............................................................................................. 4 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3. 4. FIRE portal ................................................................................................................................ 4 FIRE forum ............................................................................................................................... 4 FIRE architecture board .......................................................................................................... 5

EXPERIMEDIA - BonFIRE collaboration .................................................................................. 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 9

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1. Introduction
The deliverable at hand describes the activities performed in the context of work-package 5.3 Collaboration during the first reporting period (Year 1). work-package 5.3 deals with promoting the collaboration between EXPERIMEDIA and other FIRE projects as well as contributing to the development of the overall FIRE technical strategy. Work-package 5.3 is framed in Activity 5, which is devoted to Legal, sustainability and promotion issues and is fully described in Annex I - Description of Work. The objective of this document is to provide reasonable account of the collaboration activities within FIRE developed during Year 1 of the project. In these first twelve months, EXPERIMEDIA has successfully established awareness within the FIRE community and among the ecosytem of the partners. Dissemination activities undertaken are reported in D5.2.3 First Dissemination Report and will not be repeated here. This Collaboration Report is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the activities performed in the context of FIRE, such as supporting FIRESTATION, participating in FIRE Architecture Board meetings, contributing to decisions on FIRE forum and portal, etc. Section 3 records the on-going discussions on a closer collaboration with BonFIRE project, whereas Section 4 concludes the deliverable.

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2. Collaboration in the context of FIRE

2.1. FIRE portal
FIRESTATIONs objective is to provide FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) Initiative with an active support hub that guides and coordinates the demands and requirements of experimentation in the context of future networks and services. FIRESTATION originally aimed to create the so-called 'one stop shop' portal for FIRE activities. The scope of the portal task was somehow limited becoming a web portal1 (www.ict-fire.eu) to offer all the relevant information about FIRE community. The reasons that led to this decision were mainly the lack of necessary resources and the complexity of work to implement a portal that involves the federation of the facilities. This was decided in the FIRE Architecture Board (AB) discarding a more ambitious portal as entry point to the FIRE facilities. EXPERIMEDIA participated in the AB as other facility projects (see Section 2.3 below for details). The original portal task conceived in FIRESTATION covered both the web portal information and the more ambitious one stop shop entry point to all FIRE facilities. Current FIRE web portal is operated and hosted by Eurescom2 under FIRESTATION contract ending by May 2013 and the transition period is planning towards another project picking up the responsibility. We expect that the new CSA project called AmpliFIRE - Amplifying Future Internet Research and Experimentation for a Sustainable Future will assume part of the information web portal. A crucial point will be the transfer of the ownership of the web portal and domain since Eurescom is not in the new CSA. On the other hand, the single entry portal for the FIRE experimenters shall be included in the federation IP project called FED4FIRE starting on October 2013 and coordinated by IBBT. EXPERIMEDIA welcomes the implementation of such a portal and will contribute providing necessary input to the requirements specifications and the pointers of our testbeds if appropriate. IT Innovation are a partner in AmpliFIRE and IT Innovation, NTUA and ATOS are members of the FED4FIRE consortium so effective cooperation on this topic is ensured.

2.2.

FIRE forum

The FIRE forum was planned by the coordination action FIRESTATION to provide community support for experimenters who have an interest or who are already using FIRE facilities. In a formal sense the FIRE Forum has not yet been established by FIRESTATION. Instead FIRESTATION has initiated a series of actions targeting the experimenter community. These include: a dedicated FIRE LinkedIn group for dissemination of news to and support discussion within the community

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http://www.ict-fire.eu http://www.eurescom.eu/

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two FIRE engineering workshops which in part have focused on experiments using FIRE facilities

During the first year EXPERIMEDIA has engaged with the FIRE experimenter community primarily to raise the awareness of the facility's goals and the opportunity for experimentation through open calls. EXPERIMEDIA has posted news in the ICT-FIRE website, advertised the 1st open call on the LinkedIn group and actively sought collaboration with STREP research proposals in call 8. EXPERIMEDIA will have experiment results in Year 2 of the project and will use such results to engage more deeply in the FIRE experimenter community.

2.3.

FIRE architecture board

EXPERIMEDIA representatives have participated in the FIRE architecture board and ensued discussion and debate on potential collaboration. We have aimed to ensure effective crossproject technical strategy, small technical implementations, technical coherence and efficiency in European testbed facility. To that end, we have participated so far in two FIRE Architecture Board meetings, where discussion has addressed important issues including: How to support the development of the Work Program 2013, Horizon 2020 FIRE portal and federation issues The Smart Cities workshop and feedback Feedback from the open calls FIRE architecture collaboration topics on FIRE wiki Presentation of the FI-PPP Infinity project Status of the discussions between FI-PPP, FI-WARE and OpenLab How does FIRE relate to the FI PPP? Preparation for FIRE hands-on demo in FIA Aalborg and for FIRE participation in TridentCom FIRE questionnaire to experimenters Discussion on FIRE ROADMAP III MyFIRE Contribution to the FIRE roadmap Report from Measurements workshop Proposal for working group FIRE workshop planning FIRE International Cooperation position paper FIRE KPIs Feedback from experiments performed by open calls Best practices from the Open calls

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3. EXPERIMEDIA - BonFIRE collaboration

An important trend was discussed at the FIRE Architecture Board meetings which puts EXPERIMEDIA in an especially important position within FIRE. Whereas the majority of FIRE projects are infrastructure-oriented, the relatively newer projects EXPERIMEDIA and SmartSantander3 are more focused on applications and the end-users enjoying them, and the strategic discussion within the FIRE Architecture Board is that this represents a real trend, and a general movement towards real people as users and towards technological outputs usable by such users, is indeed desirable and should be continued. In this context, if focus on infrastructure-only projects is decreased (it will not shift away from them completely, of course), it is even more important to demonstrate whether it is possible for the user and application oriented newer generation of FIRE projects to make use of the lower level outputs of the infrastructure-focused older generation of projects. As one result, very interesting conversations started at the sidelines of the FIRE Architecture Board, and evolved into a regular inter-project contact, between EXPERIMEDIA and BonFIRE4, for EXPERIMEDIA to make use of the BonFIRE infrastructure. This would be doubly beneficial, as BonFIRE possesses considerably more infrastructure resources than EXPERIMEDIA, so that access to these resources could greatly benefit EXPERIMEDIA, while also the FIRE-specificity of BonFIRE meant that this infrastructure is available in a context already sensitive to the experimental process common to FIRE projects, e.g. the BonFIRE XML Schema Definition could be a convenient representation for EXPERIMEDIA as well. This discussion is currently pending licensing developments, since the original drive for collaboration between EXPERIMEDIA and BonFIRE has been followed up with considerable investigation into the technical underpinnings required for the collaboration, however licensing issues need to be resolved before the technical collaboration can make practical progress. The following discussion (see D2.1.3 First Blueprint architecture for social and networked media testbeds) shows the planned architecture intended to leverage the infrastructure and experiment modelling contributions of BonFIRE in the context of EXPERIMEDIA. Infrastructure relates to the compute, storage, networking, sensor and actuator technology necessary to run FMI applications and services described above. Each of the Content Components depends on infrastructure for its operation and an experimenter must be able to setup and control infrastructure required by their experiment. Each of the EXPERIMEDIA venues offers infrastructure for use in experiments which is described in D3.1.1 First Infrastructure and Software Assets Inventory. In some cases the infrastructure is currently bespoke and developed for a targeted application (e.g. Tholos). EXPERIMEDIA will explore how such infrastructure can be "opened" through standardised interfaces so that the capabilities are available for a wider variety of applications. In other cases the available infrastructure is more general purpose (e.g. virtualised hardware, 3G/4G networks) and here EXPERIMEDIA will use standard API specifications offered by such technology.

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http://www.smartsantander.eu/ http://www.bonfire-project.eu/

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Monitoring dashboard

Dissemination level: PU

GUI

Portal
LDAP API

Identity Server
(Used by Portal, Experiment Manager, Broker and Testbeds)

Experiment Manager

OCCI

Monitoring

Scheduling

Reservation

Accounting

ResourceManager

Read/ Write

Message Queue

OCCI

Scheduling

Reservation

Accounting

Enactor

OCCI SSH

Scheduling

Reservation

Accounting

Testbed SSH SSH Gateway Gateway

Monitoring GUI Monitoring API

VM (Monitoring Aggregator)

VM

VM

Figure 1: BonFIRE Architecture BonFIRE Consortium

Special attention will be made towards the integration of cloud infrastructures including controlled networking. For venues such as Schladming the use of cloud infrastructure is important to support the up-scaling and down-scaling of infrastructures for dynamic communities attending live events. Here, EXPERIMEDIA expects to work closely with BonFIRE project that is specifically developing a FIRE facility for multi-site clouds and controlled networking. The BonFIRE architecture and technology model (see Figure 1) is expected to be integrated directly with EXPERIMEDIA throughout the experiment lifecycle. BonFIRE offers EXPERIMEDIA many benefits including: 1) Infrastructure abstractions and experiment methodology: the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) abstractions and experiment descriptors for infrastructure can be used to describe and provide access to infrastructure necessary for FMI experiments. EXPERIMEDIA should use rather than replicate this work. 2) Cloud management technology: the Open Nebula cloud management software provides standardised access to cloud resources. The software is available on Apache 2 license and could be deployed directly at EXPERIMEDIA venues for hybrid cloud and cloud bursting scenarios. 3) Performance experiments for infrastructure aspects: the BonFIRE facility services could be used to ensure that the FMI system will scale and perform appropriately prior to deployment at the venues. This could be achieved using the Virtual Wall or two BonFIRE sites. This is an example of a longer experiment lifecycle where one lab based
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FIRE facility is used before rolling out the system to users in pilots at EXPERIMEDIA venues. 4) Up-scaling and downscaling for Schladming Venue: BonFIRE is not a production cloud but if an experiment wanted to explore horizontal/vertical scaling as part of the experiment then BonFIRE could be a suitable cloud infrastructure. If however it's just computational resources that are necessary, then a commercial cloud such as Amazon would be more appropriate. 5) Controlled GEANT networking for CAR Venue: BonFIRE is developing architecture for dynamic allocation of Bandwidth over GEANT using the AutoBAHN software. The development of this capability as part of the experimental process and integration of controlled networking with cloud management software such as Open Nebula could be used directly by EXPERIMEDIA.

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4. Conclusion
This deliverable provides a record of the collaboration activities undertaken during the first year of the EXPERIMEDIA project. EXPERIMEDIA has contributed to FIRE related activities by participating in the Architecture Board, helping design the overall FIRE technical strategy, and engaging with the FIRE experimenter community to raise the awareness of the facility's goals and the opportunity for experimentation through open calls. EXPERIMEDIA will have experiment results in Year 2 of the project and will use such results to engage more deeply in the FIRE experimenter community, thus assisting more substantially in disseminating results, attracting users and communicating research challenges. Discussions on FIREs future directions have also been increasingly pointing out a trend towards application and end-user orientation, which brings EXPERIMEDIA to a special place among FIRE projects. These discussions have also sparked off an inter-project contact and, subsequently, collaboration between EXPERIMEDIA and BonFIRE, in the form of scrutinising the possibility of EXPERIMEDIA making use of BonFIREs rich infrastructure. Progress on this inter-project collaboration, as well as possible results, will be documented in the next iteration of the Collaboration Report, due in PM 24, right at the conclusion of the projects Expansion phase.

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