mF2C 6th Newsletter (Winter 2019)

Antonio Salis
Reading Time: 6 minutes

 

mF2C sixth Newsletter Winter 2019

Hello dear readers and well met!

This is the 6th and final newsletter from the mF2C project, bringing you the latest news and updates about everything fog and cloud. The project is nearly complete, finishing at the end of the year, and the developers are as busy as ever! Join us in seeing what we’ve accomplished this past half year and what work remains to be done until the final review in January.

The product page

As the project is nearing completion and has reached a usable state, mF2C now has a commercial product webpage at https://www.mf2c-project.eu/product/. It describes, from a commercial perspective, all of the numerous benefits mF2C provides end users, such as cloud/fog providers, technology providers, service providers and users. As the mF2C framework provides a coordinated management of traditional cloud architectures and novel fog ones, it offers unique capabilities for distributed execution of applications throughout IoT, fog and cloud environments across a wide variety of industry verticals. Technology leaders from the personnel of existing key mF2C users have voiced their opinions about the progress and benefits the platform provides.

 

 

New deliverables

There have been many new deliverables released to inform you in detail of the project’s implementation and overall progress, both architectural and in-depth. Deliverable D3.4 focused on the improvements on the design of the Agent Controller, while deliverable D4.4 focused on the improvements of the Platform Manager. Scientific, technological and business trends from the past year were also investigated in deliverable D2.3.     The integration of components in the Agent Controller and the Platform Manager were described in deliverables D3.6 and D4.6, respectively. Finally, all mF2C interfaces were described in D4.8.

You are welcome to read them all at https://www.mf2c-project.eu/press-room/deliverables/.

ISC High Performance 2019 in Frankfurt

Over 3,700 practitioners and users came together in Frankfurt, Germany, from June 21 – 25, to discuss and explore international developments and trends in some of the fastest growing segments of IT. Rosa Maria Badia, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, has  participated in the technical panel on parallel technologies and methodologies in ISC High Performance 2019, and spoke about the COMPSs software, used in the mF2C project.

Open Expo Europe 2019

The Open Expo Europe 2019 was held in Madrid on June 20th 2019, with a participation of about 3000 people, mostly from industry.

mF2C was the most voted candidate of all categories, collecting more than 400 votes in less than a week. It has been selected for presentation, and has had the chance to pitch in an industry-oriented event to a wide set of representatives of open innovation in Europe and Latin America.

This was the 4th edition of the most important awards in our sector with the objective to publicly recognize companies, administrations, personalities and communities that create, support and promote Open IT Innovation.

The mF2C Workshop in Euro-Par 2019

Euro-Par is the prime European conference covering all aspects of parallel and distributed processing, ranging from theory to practice, from small to the largest parallel and distributed systems and infrastructures, from fundamental computational problems to full-fledged applications, from architecture, compiler, language and interface design and implementation, to tools, support infrastructures, and application performance aspects. Euro-Par’s unique organization into topics provides an excellent forum for focused technical discussion, as well as interaction with a large, broad and diverse audience.

Four papers have been accepted and presented at the mF2C Workshop co-located in Euro-Par 2019, held on August 27th 2019 in Gottingen, Germany.

  • Xavi Masip Bruin, Eva Marin Tordera, Rosa Maria Badia, Antonio Salis, Ana Juan Ferrer, Jens Jensen, John Kennedy, Matija Cankar, Admela Jukan, Andrea Bartoli and Marc Elian Begin, “mF2C: The Evolution of Cloud Computing towards an Open and Coordinated Ecosystem of Fogs and Clouds”
  • Massimo Gaggero, Giovanni Busonera, Luca Pireddu and Gianluigi Zanetti, “TDM Edge Gateway: a flexible microservice-based edge gateway architecture for heterogeneous sensors”
  • Antonio Salis, Jens Jensen, Roberto Bulla, Glauco Mancini and Paolo Cocco, “Security and Privacy management in a fog-to-cloud environment”
  • Saso Stanovnik and Matija Cankar, “On the similarities and differences between the Cloud, Fog and the Edge”
  The meeting has been chaired by Rosa M. Badia from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center that welcomed all attendees and introduced the Keynote presentation titled “Cloud has inspired Edge and Fog Computing: are we ready to see them as a whole?”, led by Massimo Villari of the University of Messina. She described the latest works and challenges on parallel technologies and methodologies, expressing workflows with data and compute tasks, supporting many different non-functional requirements, and presented the mF2C framework as an example.

A Technical Panel, with questions and answers, completed the workshop. The Panel was chaired by Antonio Salis (Engineering) with participation of Massimo Villari (University of Messina), Rosa M. Badia (BSC) and Fabrizio Marozzo (University of Calabria), and focused on Emerging trends, technologies, challenges and business scenarios in Fog to Cloud architectures.

Rosa has also received the Euro-Par Achievement Award 2019. The Euro-Par Steering Committee has granted the Euro-Par Achievement Award at the yearly Euro-Par conference since 2008 individuals who have made special contributions to parallel processing.

The 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)

Rosa Maria Badia, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center has participated the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2019)  held on July 7th to 9th, in Dallas, Texas, USA.

She had an invited speech on parallel technologies and methodologies, expressing workflows with data and compute tasks, supporting many different non-functional requirements, with lots of dynamics, leading to changes in the morphology of the flow.

In the speech, the COMPSs software was referenced as one of the main enabler components for these challenges that is currently used in the mF2C project.

The IoT Solutions World Congress

The mF2C Project has attended the IoT Solutions World Congress, will be held on 29-31 October 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. IoTSWC is the largest IoT event in the world to get inspired with new ideas, solutions and people.

The STFC Food Network workshop on STFC technologies

Jens Jensen, from UKRI/STFC, has participated to the SFN workshop on STFC technologies for food management, held on 22 October 2019 at the University of Exeter business school. He presented a followup on the promotion of the mF2C platform for prawns aquaculture. We received very useful feedback and hints from the Indonesian Organization on how mF2C can be proficiently used in food management, how to finalize a prototype for it, and a proposal to be funded for a project to exploit the sensor-fog-to-cloud technology demonstrated in mF2C.

ETSI MEC #146 Tech Meeting

The mF2C Project has been presented at the ETSI MEC ISG #146 meeting, held remotely on October 29th 2019. It was organized by Chantal Bonardi (ETSI), and chaired by Alex Reznik (HPE). Twenty-two people, mostly from big telco players like Huawei, Vodafone, Nokia, ZTE, Orange, KDDI, IDCC, Altice Labs, or from notable standardizations bodies like ITU, attended the meeting.

Alex Reznik started the meeting, completed some formal steps, and then introduced the mF2C presentation. Ana Juan Ferrer made a brief introduction of the project, then Xavi Masip made a technical presentation of the mF2C framework going into the details of the framework and the architecture. After the presentation some questions regarding the software licence, the user registration process, the choice to avoid horizontal communication in fog layers have been raised, and clarification given.

As general outcome, we got a great interest, most of participants requested a link to get the presentation, we hope to collaborate further with ETSI MEC, but also with other standardization bodies for a successful followup!

mF2C documentation updated, usability tests

The mF2C consortium of developers embarked on the journey to improve developer and user documentation and improve the general usability of platform. Experienced developers from partners who have never used mF2C have started testing the platform from a new developer perspective. They have already produced multiple documents detailing the needed changes to the documentation and developer perspective, most of which has already been integrated into the mF2C code.

The 9th mF2C project meeting in Cagliari

mF2C has had its 9th general review meeting in Cagliari, on September 30th-October 2nd 2019. The meeting was held in the Tiscali Campus, organized by Engineering Sardegna, chaired by UPC and ATOS.

The objective was to finalize all activities to be done, to approach the final review in the best possible way. The second day has been spent on the Integration Status & List of Features for use cases,  presenting a live demo of deployment of the agent and microagent, with pending issues.

Then an hands-on session followed trying to fix some issues, clarifying what needs to be completed, to finalise integrations & joint test. We defined a calendar of actions, defining the deadline for the code-freeze, extensive testing and integration.

After that the use cases updated in terms of what is expected to be demonstrated, expected benefits coming from mF2C and that could be exploited in the Use Cases, how to show relations between use cases and mf2c components, defined technical KPIs and how they will be measured and shown.

Each partner gave a concrete exploitation routes for mF2C, use cases and all exploitable assets.

In the final day Ana recapped the requested Actions for the final Review, and followup on EAB recommendations. Then each assigned editor presented the final deliverables due for M36, describing ToC, Calendar and expected contribution by the various partners.

Coming up: 10th mF2C project meeting in Ljubljana

The next and final project meeting will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia on 10-11th December 2019. All consortium members will meet to discuss final points in preparation for the demo to project reviewers.

 

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