CELAR: Automatic, multi-grained elasticity-provisioning for the Cloud (CELAR)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Greece,Cyprus,Austria,United Kingdom,Switzerland
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2011-8, 2011)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2015-09-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3466678.0
EU funding (EUR): 2613995.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

With the rapidly growing number of applications running over Cloud infrastructures and the amount of storage, compute and networking resources they require, an over-provisioning or manual, coarse-grained resource allocation approach is a highly unsatisfying solution with respect to application performance and incurred costs. The vision of the CELAR project is to provide automatic, multi-grained resource allocation for cloud applications. This enables the commitment of just the right amount of resources based on application demand, performance and requirements, results in optimal use of infrastructure resources and significant reductions in administrative costs. The goal of the project is to develop methods and tools for applying and controlling multi-grained, elastic resource provisioning for Cloud applications in an automated manner. This resource allocation will be performed through intelligent decision-making based on: (a) Cloud and application performance metrics collected and cost-evaluated through a scalable monitoring system and exposed to the user. (b) Qualitative and quantitative characterization of the application‘s performance through modelling of its elastic properties. CELAR covers the three layers required by an application to operate over the Cloud: The infrastructure layer (deployment over two different IaaS platforms), the monitoring/optimization middleware (automatic elasticity provisioning over cloud platforms and multi-layer monitoring) and the programming development environment (through a distributed tool to enable developers, administrators and users to define the characteristics of their applications, submit jobs and monitor performance). The outcome is a modular, completely open-source system that offers elastic programmability for the user and automatic elasticity at the platform level. This outcome can be bundled in a single software package for one-click installation of any application alongside its automated resource provisioning over a Cloud IaaS. Two exemplary applications that showcase and validate the aforementioned technology will be developed: The first will showcase the use of CELAR technology for massive data management and large-scale collaboration required in the on-line gaming realm, while the second will focus on the area of scientific computing, requiring compute- and storage-intensive genome computations. The CELAR consortium – under the lead of ATHENA Research and Innovation Center – is well-positioned to achieve its objectives by bringing together a team of leading researchers in the large-scale technologies such as Cloud/Grid Computing, service-oriented architectures, virtualization, analytics, Web 2.0 and the world of the Semantic Web. These are combined with active industrial and leading user organizations that offer expertise in the cloud application domain and production-level service provisioning.

Keywords: automatic elasticity provisioning,elasticity modelling,cloud monitoring,composable cost-evaluation,cloudification,application framework,eclipse,open-source