A presentation by Terry Harmer of the Belfast eScience Centre at the Repositories and the Cloud meeting organised by Eduserv and JISC in London on Feb 23 2010.

1. Cloud based Projects atBelfast e-Science CentreAn Overview Terry Harmer London 1 February 2010 http://www.besc.ac.uk

2. What do I do? Technical Directorof Belfast e-Science Develop project ideas for digital economy applications Form consortia to bid for funding … usually write the project funding proposals … funding from EPSRC, INI, TSB and private companies Lead Technical architect for projects Project Manager … also do software development These projects are (and increasingly so) based around utility infrastructure consisting of owned and multiple utility vendors. London February 2010 2

3. Talk Outline Talk objective BeSC? ..some history of BeSC applications Evolution of our infrastructure 2 Examples of utility-centric deployed applications Issues London February 2010 3

4. Objective To present some large-scale projects that are in field deployment with established user groups Dynamic and utility cloud focused Why this approach and what advantages has this approach given us. Issues, advantages, problems, pitfalls, Headline Technical London February 2010 4

5. Belfast e-Science Centre? Belfast e-Science was established in 2002 with funding from EPSRC and the DTI under the UK e-Science programme. Funded since then by TSB, EPSRC, INI, MoD, QinetiQ Currently one of four EPSRC Platform Award funded e-Science Centres in the UK. BeSC is entirely self funding (and has been since 2002) We have the attitude and tend to operate like a small R&D company Don’t really use resources within a University infrastructure Have close connections with many companies but less with host Uni. Mainly deal with commercial users and organisations. Have a tight budget and (perhaps too) big ambitions. London February 2010 5

6. A bit of BeSC Context As somewhat of an accidental decision, BeSC focused on commercial/industrial applications Some of the accident was a result of the initial DTI Centre funding emphasising commercial applications and Tony Hey’sdarwinian view of e-science programme. The industrial/commercial focus grew from the challenges within the application areas which we felt offered something new and distinct to the e-Science community. No one else was focusing there so it made us unique There are real and significant challenges London February 2010 6

8. Speed : 100,000+ share trades per second

9. Security : company business

10. heavily regulated – where how data is moved

11. On-demand infrastructure/resources

12. Hosting/utility management are necessary parts of a dynamic digital economy and technology still required. Applications Digital media –BBC, QinetiQ Financial Services –First Derivatives, ?? Military Applications –UK MoD, QinietQ Technology Resources, Auto-deployment, on-demand resources Management of owned and 3rd party clouds Autonomic management, SLAs and scaling London February 2010 7

13. Experimental Environment (2003) London February 2010 8 BBCNI

14. Experimental Environment (Spring 2004) London February 2010 9

15. Experimental Environment (Autumn 2004) London February 2010 10

16. Experimental Environment (Autumn 2005) London February 2010 11

17. Deployment Environment 2010 London February 2010 12

18. 2 Examples Financial Services with FD On-demand media with BBC/QinetiQ/BT London February 2010 13

19. First Derivatives plc Provider of software to banks and financial services companies. Have software in 9 of the top 10 banks. Develop auto-trading software Provide financial services, consulting, technology outsourcing, design etc London February 2010 14

20. Simple Architecture London February 2010 15

21. Solution 1: 2004-2005 London February 2010 16

22. Current Cloud Solution (2006- ) London February 2010 17

23. Digital Media (2002-) Working in the evolving on-demand media environment Partners: BBC/QinetiQ/BT….completed late 2009 Started pre- iPlayer and YouTube! Concern early was on better resource utilisation in and expensive and highly dynamic environment. Early model of pooled resources Most recently in on-demand media infrastructures Project PRISM with BBC/QinetiQ/BT Supporting game console to Phone to set-top box access. Much of our work now is on military media infrastructures. London February 2010 18

24. A circuit based infrastructure London February 2010 19

25. A Media SOA (this Slide dates from 2003!) London 20 February 2010

26. Mobile Non-geographic services (slide from 2005!) London 21 February 2010

27. A Dynamic Utility Cloud London February 2010 22

28. Work flow Work with BBC is winding down Expertise is moving to military applications. Managing currently around 1+ petabytes of media content Has managed close to 2petabytes in the last 4 years. London February 2010 23

29. Infrastructure Summary Dynamic collections of services Managing real user groups Service scale to established SLAs We attempt to keep our deployed infrastructure low Our infrastructure is a mix of owned and utility infrastructure Buying capacity and storage on demand is our norm. increasingly the utility part is the majority for processing and user interfaces Owned infrastructure is a secure repository. London February 2010 24

30. Advantages (headline) Develop an infrastructure that suits the application we are deploying. The cost of ownership is pretty low. As an R&D organisation we can punch above our small size and relatively small budget. Experiment with great flexibility running parallel shared infrastructures. Reach out to real user groups ….. Unconstrained by (often entirely justified) corporate/academic infrastructure procedures. You own what you need to own for as long as you need to own it and it can be configured exactly for your needs. London February 2010 25

31. Issues (general) Utility resource market is immature We treat providers as a commodity market place. The offerings can be difficult to compare No standard unit of compute/storage Prices will be dependant on the user usage pattern What you get and what you can buy varies widely Some attempts at customer lock-in to providers Multi-provider clouds can be (relatively) expensive Need to think carefully about what is stored, where it is stored, how long it is stored, who has access We have put a lot of work into automated policy based content management….because we do not have the people to manage this. Based around SAML and XACML London February 2010 26

32. Issues (general) Provider APIs and features constantly changing. No standard API New services and providers appearing. APIs not very well documented Weak SLAs from providers Currently we build our infrastructure assuming there is no SLA. London February 2010 27

33. Issues (technical) Machine performance unpredictable. CPU features especially unpredictable and can make a big difference to compute-heavy tasks e.g. we are heavy video transcoding users. individual instances can be (surprisingly) unreliable (hosts DO crash) Bandwidth unpredictable and can be costly Required to manage OS images proliferation of images; using anything but vendor images requires trust in creator. nobody has a trust framework - you have to trust that user creating own images (or using other peoples) means more machines to keep up to date! London February 2010 28

35. Issues (banal) Area not well understood What was the inventory tag of the machine? Why are you not using our in-house IS cluster? London February 2010 30