Proceedings of2012 International Conference on Cloud Computing, Technologies, Applications & Management

Keynote: Cloud Computing &

Applications

Dr.Eesa Mohammed Bastaki

CEO, lCT Fund, Dubai, UAE

eesa@bastaki.ae

Dr. Eesa Mohammed Bastaki, Ph.D. is the CEO of the ICT foundation and is

actively leading the effort in creating an eco-system in the UAE ICT industry

by encouraging entrepreneurship, funding R&D projects and University

scholarships and implementing ICT initiatives at the school level.

As a UAE national scientist and researcher, he completed his B.Sc. and M.5c.

degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Irvine. His

research interests are Multiple Access Communications, Coding and

Synchronizing. He is the recipient for Sheikh Rashid's Award for Scientific

Excellence. In 2009, he received UAE's highest award "The Emirates Award

for Science, Art and Literature" in Sciences.

The objectives of cloud computing is to centralize every data, file, application and technical solutions

software that are needed for a user. This is what was known earlier as 'thin computing' or 'thin

client' environment. Individual collections of personal computers and server rooms spread around

all over can be replaced by one unified system holding all the files, applications and operating

systems we need for an entire organization. As an end user, one doesn't need to carry a USB flash

drives, optical CDs or hard drives to operate programs and software packages. Instead one can work

with what is effectively a dumb terminal, which can be used to access programs and files from a

central server known as clouds.

In the UAE, a program called National Interest ICT Projects exists, and one of the vital projects is a

National Research and Education Network (NREN) called 'Ankabut', which means 'spider'. One is

only allowed to join the network if the Internet access is at least one gigabit per second while the

backbone is at least 10 gigabits per second. More than 50 campuses or more than 30 universities

are connected to Ankabut, which in turn is connected to other national research and education

networks, including Internet2 in the United States, Janet in the UK, and across Europe through

GEANT.

Dr Eesa highlighted his proposal to Ankabut a project known as "ANCHOR" which stands for "Ankabut

National Cloud & Hypercomuting ORganization", where it creates series of private clouds, such as a

cloud for universities, a cloud for incubators, a cloud for libraries and a cloud for government.

This, in his visioin shared with audience, allows users across the country to have the same resources

- software, operating systems, number-crunching capability, high-performance computing - and

whatever they need would be served by this private cloud. One of the advantages of this project,

as impressed by Dr. Eesa is, the obvious reduction of cost. While impressing the auidence with his

illuminating facts about UAE & Middle East, in particular and visionary insights, in general, during his

talk he stated: "why should universities duplicate the same research facilities? With Ankabut, one

can have the potential for researchers in separate laboratories to work together via virtual

reality , not just sharing ideas, but sharing resources and performing remote experiments in real

time. In addition, a virtual library is another application for Ankabut in UAE to share resources

without having a library in every campus". xvii

Proceedings of2012 International Conference on Cloud Computing, Technologies, Applications & Management

Keynote: Cloud Collaboration Service­

Earning From Cloud

Dr. Osman Ahmed VP and Head, Siemens Center of Excellence on Smart Buildings, Masdar, Abu Dhabi

Osman.ahmed@siemens.com

Considered one of the most successful innovators in the field of Micro

Electromechanical Systems (MEMS), Dr. Osman Ahmed has been working with

Siemens for the past 25 years and is presently the VP and Head of Centre of

Excellence for Smart Buildings at Masdar City, Siemens, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Having

studied in Bangladesh, Canada and the US, he always wanted to do something

different as a person. It was in 1997 that he first heard about MEMS at a

conference and this went on to become the focus of his career and since then

there has been no looking back.

A holder of 75 patents, Dr. Osman is an innovator and techno-preneur whose

focus is on emerging technologies for the creation of corporate assets- both

intellectual and capital. His research and work covers a wide variety of topics such as applications of artificial

intelligence in building systems to model-based virtual building systems for commissioning, 3D visualization,

and advanced applications. He is currently engaged in establishing an open innovation network model around

the globe. He is also a two-time technical achievement award winner within the SBT as well as the recipient of

the 2004 prestigious Siemens Inventor of the Year award for his work on micro-system application for

buildings.

The name "Cloud" in cloud computing is derived from cloud shaped symbol as an

abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. But what if, the

name was derived from natural cloud? Cloud as a natural process sustains life and preserves

precious water resource. The process that is complex, not fully understood but yet highly

efficient, autonomous and cyclic. Is there any similarity between natural cloud and

collaboration topology that can be envisioned using cloud computing?

Dr.Osman provided a quick overview of natural cloud including its formation, attributes,

transportation, and its overall role in rain or water cycle. He argued that a knowledge

cycle can be envisioned that can utilize a collaboration model similar to how natural cloud

is formed. The collaboration model conceptualizes a specific configuration of cloud computing

architecture that is again similar to the distribution model of natural cloud. Specific examples

of collaboration model were given for sustainable built-environment applications. During thought

provoking discussion that concluded the talk, Dr. Osman stimulates thinking among the computer,

IT and business experts to look for new solutions inspired by nature that has been beautifully

sustaining life since the beginning of the earth.

xviii

Proceedings of2012 International Conference on Cloud Computing, Technologies, Applications & Management

Keynote: UAE Educational Cloud over

ANKABUT

Dr. Ahmed Dabbagh

Technology & Services Dev Manager, Ankabut, UAE ahmed.dabbaqh@ankabut.ae

Dr. Ahmed Dabbagh is Manager of Technology & Services Development at the UAE Advanced

Network for Research and Education "Ankabut". His main role is to enhance collaboration

between the different Higher Education Institutions over UAE, by using the stat-of-the-art

technology to connect and communicate and to create a common sense in research and

education, like eLearning, eLibrary and Grid Computing. Dr. Dabbagh is leading the UAE

initiatives in Grid-Cloud Computing and the Certification Authority. Prior to joining Ankabut, Dr.

Dabbagh was the Director of the Academic e-Services Department at Ajman University of

Science and Technology, UAE. Dr. Dabbagh was working in France & Germany for several years

in the domain of micro-controllers and a wide range of micro-processors architectures ranging

from 16 bits up to 64 bit with the very known Semiconductors industry like STMicroelectronics,

Siemens, Motorola, .... He is the inventor of several patents in this important field. Dr. Dabbagh gained a Master of Science

"D.E.A." in Images and Signal Processing from the University of Rennes in 199 1 and a PhD in Telecommunications from the

University of Rennes, France, in 1995.

United Arab Emirates - UAE's leading universities formed a dedicated research and education network

within the country named "Ankabut". Ankabut caters for the regional educational and research needs,

offering great improvements in how research is conducted, as well as improving the teaching and learning

processes. It also provides collaboration and sharing of resources. It links for international collaboration

with other research network such as the US Internet2 and the European GEANT. The available network

bandwidth at Ankabut is 155.52Mbit/s international link and interconnects over 56 UAE university

Campuses with a lOG backbone and IG access links. It provides access via its advanced 6 Core routers

(10Gb) backbone and 56 access routers (1Gb). This connects to a High Performance Computing Cluster of

at least 10 TFlops at Khalifa University. Ankabut is a host of at least 60-core CPU running gLite middleware

for Grid Computing and 64 Cores for a High Performance Computing Cluster of at least 1.2 TFlops over the

Cloud. Ankabut has a 5 years plan of the community services, and now is planning to build the UAE

Educational Cloud. Ankabut is offering all types of Network services adding to it as Web Hosting, DNS, NTP

Videoconferencing by default to its members. It provides a closed community network that allows the

transfer of real-time services such as converged 1M, voice and video communication, non-real time

services such as e-Iearning, email, library interconnect, off-site disaster recovery, global federated single­

sign-on and Wi-Fi networking to name a few. eFADA, the UAE Library Consortium is under the Operation

Management of Ankabut. The network is funded by the ICT Fund and Khalifa University jointly.

xix

Proceedings of2012 International Conference on Cloud Computing, Technologies, Applications & Management

Keynote: Noisy Neighbors, Isolation and

QoS in Cloud Infrastructures

Prof. Dr. Peter J. Varman Department of E CE, MS-380, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas

pjv@rice.edu

Prof. Peter Varman is a Professor at Rice University, Houston where has joint appointments in the

Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science. From

2002 to 2005 he was Program Director for computer systems architecture at US National Science

Foundation. During 20 1 1-20 12 he was a Scholar in Residence at VMware where he worked on

resource management for virtualization and cloud computing. He has also held short-term

visiting positions at Intel, IBM T.1. Watson and Almaden Research Labs, Duke University, and NTU

Singapore. He served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers and currently is a

member of the editorial board of the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization. His research

interests spans virtualization, resource management, computer architecture, storage systems,

and applied algorithms.

Deployment of multi-tenant cloud infrastructures requires a framework to allocate and manage shared

resources at multiple scales. A basic requirement in these shared infrastructures is to ensure isolation

among concurrent workloads and provide them with performance based on quality of service (Q05)

guarantees. The need for effective sharing is driving research into new resource allocation policies, pricing

models, and algorithms for resource allocation and scheduling.

In his talk, Prof. Varman first gave a brief overview of resource management issues arising at different

levels in a cloud environment. Then, the talk focused on some specific problems arising in this domain:

providing latency guarantees for bursty workloads, providing reservations and limits in a proportional share server with fluctuating capacity, and dynamically allocating resources in distributed resource pools. Prof.

Peter also described the new scheduling mechanisms to achieve the desired behavior along with their

experimental validation.

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