Group-Digest on ulno.net

Diagram from meeting

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Research group digest

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Cloud Computing Contracts

The new delivery model for information processing, Cloud Computing is offering an attractive value proposition: Dynamic (on-demand) provisioning of IT resources Low cost because of the use of economy of scale and multi-tenancy sharing of resources Shorter time to market in deploying resources Different cost structure; the shift from CAPEX to OPEX But although this […]

Research group digest

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Disable all swapping on Ubuntu Linux

That’s how it goes for Ubuntu:

Disable current swapping strategy ( swappiness it’s called)

echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Disable swapping all together

swapoff -a

Research group digest

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0200

My Search Logger is OUT!

Hi all!

I am happy to announce that my proxy-based search task logging software is now (finally) available to DOWNLOAD! There are a number of new features and improved existing ones. In order to get an idea of what to expect, I will share a few snapshots. Happy searching!

Research group digest

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

5 Ways Your Users Can Benefit from Cloud Anti-Spam

While many email admins prefer to keep their messaging hygiene in their own datacenters, others who are looking to save money and reduce the amount of hardware in their datacenters should consider cloud anti-spam solutions. There are some great features in cloud anti-spam that can help admins and their systems, and, let’s not forget, our […]

Research group digest

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Rolling your own watchdog for Qemu

Sometimes there may arise a need to make your own watchdog for your virtual machine. The process itself is really a simple one, I will base this example on Intel’s 6300esb watchdog.

Research group digest

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

How to do a search report? The Search Logger 2.0 usability study

Summary

The background

The aim of the Search Task Repository project is to let the users/Internet searchers publish their annotated search logs and make these logs searchable. In order to log ones search activity and behaviour, we have developed a special tool called The Search Logger 2.0. Here “2.0” means that a conceptually similar but technically very different logger existed before I started with this project and was developed by Hannu Kikkas. The current version is platform-independent and uses a proxy to modify every web page served so that it could be logged by our dedicated HTTP server. The Search Task Repository is currently in development and will be one of the main topics of my Master thesis.

Research group digest

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Two new search tasks

Hello all,

I have two new exploratory search tasks with complete search logger data to report.

The first one is seasonal: finding 5 clever Christmas present ideas for under 10 euros per item. Target is unfixed but you can assume it is a lady.

Research group digest

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Search Logger 2.0 DEMO video

Here you will find a video of somewhat superior quality. Enjoy!

Aspects of the software covered in this video:

filling in pre- and post-forms by the user
automatic logging of the user search behaviour
different log formats
searching itself using Google

Aspects NOT covered in the screencast:

Research group digest

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Green cloud computing, which way to go?

What is the right cloud architecture to create a green and sustainable cloud? Should we consolidate to huge mega data centers or is there another way to go? The analogy Currently data centers are constructed on the intersection of the electrical energy infrastructure and the network (data) infrastructure. Considering the current electrical energy infrastructure, for […]

Research group digest

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

How are cloud computing companies going to effect the online storage service industry?

Recently Eric Greenwood from OnlineStorage.org asked, me “..Do you have any opinions on how cloud computing companies are going to effect the online storage service industry? A view from an economic mind like yours would be very interesting!” Aren´t online storage service providers themselves also cloud computing companies? I am a heavy (not yet paying) user of […]

Research group digest

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Initial screencast of the interface

Hi!

I carried out another search task and recorded a screencast presenting the whole process.

Task:

Compile a list of the five best universities (worldwide) to achieve a master’s in machine engineering (or closely related field) under the condition that you have 1500 EUR per month available to cover all involved costs.

Research group digest

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

User testing + bugfixes + further development

Hi!

These are the main keywords for the coming weeks: I am trying to put myself into the end user’s perspective by testing the logging capabilities of the existing search task logger system. Each week I come up with a new expoloratory search task, carry out the testing and report crashes, bugs, new development ideas, etc. What is more, I try and fix more urgent bugs as well. This part (but mainly inventing new exploratory search tasks and generating usage data) serves as the DS Seminar work for this semester. In parallel, I am also trying to pursue new ideas regarding the Search Task Repository and make them a reality.

Research group digest

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Is Amazon the cheapest cloud computing provider?

When people think of cloud computing, they almost automatically think of Amazon EC2. Amazon has become the cloud computing company and is commonly perceived as the cheapest, if not the only, IaaS provider. But is this really so? Let’s play Myth Busters as on the Discovery Channel. Cloud Computing Myth Busters! We will compare all […]

Research group digest

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin down, resiliency of cloud computing

A lightning strike in Dublin, Ireland, has caused downtime for many sites using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, as well as users of Microsoft’s BPOS. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility service and left it unable to start its generators, resulting […]

Research group digest

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

update delays

Arrived to Sweden couple of days ago, intend to stay here until January to study in KTH. During the following next week I will be busy involved in the introductory activities and also lack decent internet connection, so no update will follow. I apologize for inconvenience.

Research group digest

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Comparing prices of cloud computing providers

When considering ROI maximization of cloud computing solutions it is crucial to minimize costs of cloud hosting, especially that differences can be very big. Anyone who has tried to compare prices of IaaS providers knows that it is a very tedious task if done manually, since there are different pricing models used, there are subscription […]

Research group digest

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

On delivering reliable services using spot instances

In the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market, spot instances refer to virtual servers that are rented via an auction. Spot instances allow IaaS providers to sell spare capacity while enabling IaaS users to acquire virtual servers at a lower price than the regular market price (also called “on demand” price). Users bid for spot instances at […]

Research group digest

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The Economics of Cloud Computing Examined

The cloud computing economic model is expected to bring significant rewards – apparently. Those rewards may be possible but the quality of analysis to demonstrate that the cloud paradigm will yield an ever-growing margin is far from assured. The assumptions underlying the economics of the cloud are tenuous and therefore the promotions and promises should […]

Research group digest

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Cloud economics penalizes large workloads

Cloud computing is heavily promoted as the low-cost alternative to in-house data centers. Yet this is not true for any context and any application. A recent paper with the title “To Move or Not to Move: The Economics of Cloud Computing” by Byung Chul Tak, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, and Anand Sivasubramainam states that especially applications with […]

Research group digest

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Python library for calculating cloud costs

Within SITIO project we developed several tools for calculating and predicting costs of running IT systems on various clouds. Recently we open-sourced one of such tools – python library ‘cloud-calculator’. Source is here: https://github.com/HEP-KBFI/ccc. Using easy_tools it can be installed as easy as “easy_install cloud-calculator”. In this blob post we show sample usage of this […]

Research group digest

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Python library for calculating cloud costs.

Within SITIO project we developed several tools for calculating and predicting costs of running IT systems on various clouds. Recently we open-sourced one of such tools – python library ‘cloud-calculator’. Source is here: https://github.com/HEP-KBFI/ccc . Using easy_tools it can be installed as easy as “easy_install cloud-calculator”. In this blob post we show sample usage of […]

Research group digest

Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Low-level awesomeness!

Get the high performance computation as close to the metal as possible: http://www.returninfinity.com/

Research group digest

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Cloud Computing; Freedom of Choice?

Shortening time to market, increasing transaction volumes, 24 x 7 business, all at lesser costs puts a burden on the information processing of organizations. How should one adapting to the increasing complexity and changes of the organization and its environment? The new delivery model for information processing, Cloud Computing, with an on-demand provisioning of computational […]

Research group digest

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Distributed Systems Seminar Presentation

Today’s presentation slides and a demo of mesh topology setup.

Troubles, troubles again

In the beginning of May it was decided that it’s time to move our machines from VirtualBox to the cloud. We even had a program developed for that case. But… it turned out to be too complicated. Despite installing all the required packages, and even installing them in the right places, the program still refuses to run. Google doesn’t say much as well. So moving to the clouds will be postponed a little bit.

Research group digest

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Using libguestfs to migrate images to cloud

In a previous post, I described some difficulties regarding manipulating VM images. Problems included mounting filesystems supported by the VM but not the host, and file permissions for those systems that were supported. One suggestion was to mount the image in another VM that would allow for complete control. Lucky for us, it turns out […]

Research group digest

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Reserved or On-Demand Instances? A Revenue Maximization Model for Cloud Providers

Cloud providers who operate large and medium-scale data centers and offer their services on a pay-per-usage basis face a challenging problem of running data centers in an energy- efficient manner while ensuring that customers’ expectations in terms of availability are met. Cloud providers benefit from significant economies of scale, since they operate large infrastructures shared […]

Research group digest

Sat, 07 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Kernel 32 vs 64 discovery

We were recently given a VirtualBox image configured to run the HPCC benchmark suite. The code to determine the OS architecture is pretty naive, and we paid for it. The code simply checked for the presence of the substring ‘amd64′ in the kernel name. The image didn’t have it, so it was migrated to EC2 […]

Research group digest

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

F2F meets Qemu

This post is about setting up VDE network between qemu machines through a F2F job. Tools I used are dpipe, vde_switch, vde_plug, nc, everything wrapped into python code that is in turn called from F2F job.

Research group digest

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service down the fourth day

I am a happy and loyal user of Dropbox.com. Well, I was at least. When hovering over the Dropbox icon, I only see “Dropbox 0.7.110 Connecting…..” lately. Weird, I thought. Well, no problem, fire up Firefox and check out Dropbox’s web page to see what is going on. Good try, but also a complete waste […]

Research group digest

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Same test, new hardware

Finally I got myself a new laptop that is the fastest thing I’ve ever used; this significant change in the hardware forced me to run the same test one more time, in case of results being importantly different. So, here are the graphs for the same two things (WIPS and TT.H). The parameters are the same as in the last post, though there is a slight difference: number of emulated browsers is 20 (red) and 40 (green).

Research group digest

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Cloud computing – a disruptive new business model

As organizations increase their offerings of digital services, the demand for computing and storage capability increases. Also the need for faster, more complex data processing is becoming widespread. Additional demand for computing capability can only be met by increasing the processing capacity of servers within data centers. Along with greater computing capability, businesses have increased […]

Research group digest

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Microsoft White Paper – Economic Benefits of Cloud Computing

Microsoft has recently, in November 2010, published a white paper with the title “The Economics of the Cloud”. In this white paper the authors mention the following potential cost savings for organisations: Cloud also allows core IT infrastructure to be brought into large data centers that take advantage of significant economies of scale in three […]

Research group digest

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

EC2 Deployment and Lifecycle API

I’ve just finished my first working draft of a python API to describe and execute an EC2 deployment with a controlled lifecycle. This is part of the larger Desktop-to-Cloud (D2C) project, aimed at assisting researchers with deploying scientific, job-based applications to the cloud. An Example deployment = Deployment( name=“testDeployment”, ec2ConnFactory=ec2ConnFactory, roles=[ Role( name=“testRole”, ami=AMI(amiId=“ami-47cefa33”), count=1, […]

Research group digest

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Finally - running the tests

The main idea of using TPC-W benchmark was to have a tool that would measure different stats like execution time and throughput. Output file is in Matlab format, which makes it a bit complicated for understanding, so I have almost no idea what all obtained numbers mean :)

Research group digest

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Risks and rewards of moving applications to the cloud – a white paper

We have recently come across an interesting discussion group called “Cloudusecases.org”. It has published two white papers titled “Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper” and “Moving to the Cloud – Risks and rewards of moving applications to the cloud“. Both papers are very interesting and informative. Especially the second one suggests the following very straight […]

Research group digest

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

To cloud or not to cloud – that’s the question

Amid the hype around cloud computing and the millions of dollars pumped into marketing those utility computing services, not every business operation will benefit by moving to the cloud. In fact it is quite simple economic considerations, that allow to make a better decision on whether to move a certain application to the cloud – […]

Research group digest

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

First Desktop-to-Cloud Job Execution

Minor success! This past week we ran our first real-world experiment on EC2 using the under-development D2C tool. The desktop tool transformed VirtualBox 64bit Ubuntu images to AMIs and launched 4 EC2 instances. Manual intervention was required to start the actual program conducting the experiment, as “auto launch” is not yet an implemented feature of […]

Research group digest

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

I’m making some progress! [configuration-wise]

My main efforts have gone to getting the SearchLogger server side working. It never worked on Windows but now it works perfectly on Linux. I also reverted from XAMPP back to traditional PHP 5 + Apache 2 + MySQL 5. The setup script worked just fine and no problems persists on the server side.