Section: Other Grants and Activities
Other contacts
Kate Keahey, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
We had informal contacts with Kate Keahey (http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~keahey/ ) from Argonne National Laboratory, USA, leader of the Nimbus cloud computing project. Gabriel Antoniu visited Kate's team at ANL in December 2009. There, he gave a seminar and had discussions about collaboration opportunities focusing on the usage of BlobSeer in Nimbus-enabled cloud infrastructures. In this context, Kate Keahey's team at ANL will host Bogdan Nicolae for a 3-month doctoral stay.
Marc Snir, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
Gabriel Antoniu was invited to participate to the 2nd workshop of the NCSA-UIUC/Inria Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing in December 2009. He took part in exploratory discussions in the area of distributed storage for Petascale architectures, with a specific focus on the Blue Waters machine (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/ ), expected to become the world's most powerful supercomputer in 2011. Gabriel will visit NCSA-UIUC again in 2010 with Bogdan Nicolae, to explore how the BlobSeer BLOB-based approach developed by KerData could be used in an optimized distributed file system for Blue Waters.
Indranil Gupta, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
During his visit at NCSA-UIUC in December 2009, Gabriel Antoniu took contact with Indranil Gupta, co-responsible for the Cloud Compute Testbed, an experimental platform for cloud computing co-funded by NSF through UIUC, in partnership with Yahoo!, Intel and HP. The discussions explored possible collaborations on the execution of MapReduce-based applications on cloud testbeds.
Roberto Baldoni, University of Rome “La sapienza”, Italy
We had informal contacts with Roberto Baldoni from the University of Rome (http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~baldoni/ ) about the usage of BlobSeer as an efficient data management substrate for MapReduce-based financial applications. Roberto Baldoni served as a referee for Gabriel Antoniu's Habilitation thesis. Gabriel visited Roberto Baldoni's team in June 2009, where he gave a seminar and discussed opportunities for collaboration.
