Pictures from the Rigorosum with Prof. Thomas Fahringer and Prof. Justus Piater.

Matthias Janetscheck Defense Pic 1

Prof. Radu Prodan

Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Radu Prodan has been invited to be a part of panel discussion on emerging Blockchain and Edge computing technology and paradigms at PAISE (Parallel AI and Systems for the Edge), collocated workshop at the prestigious 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2019 to be held at Rio de Janerio, Brazil (May 20-24 2019).

Nishant Saurabh

The paper “Semantics-aware Virtual Machine Image Management in IaaS Clouds” has been accepted for publication at 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium , IPDPS 2019 to be held at Rio de Janerio, Brazil (May 20-24 2019).

Authors: Nishant Saurabh (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt), Julian Remmers (University of Innsbruck), Dragi Kimovski (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt), Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt), Jorge G. Barbosa (LIACC, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto).

Abstract: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) Clouds concurrently accommodate diverse sets of user requests, requiring an efficient strategy for storing and retrieving virtual machine images (VMIs) at a large scale. The VMI storage management require dealing with multiple VMIs, typically in the magnitude of gigabytes, which entails VMI sprawl issues hindering the elastic resource management and provisioning. Nevertheless, existing techniques to facilitate VMI management overlook VMI semantics (i.e at the level of base image and software packages) with either restricted possibility to identify and extract reusable functionalities or with higher VMI publish and retrieval overheads. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate Expelliarmus, a novel VMI management system that helps to minimize storage, publish and retrieval overheads. To achieve this goal, Expelliarmus incorporates three complementary features. First, it makes use of VMIs modelled as semantic graphs to expedite the similarity computation between multiple VMIs. Second, Expelliarmus provides a semantic aware VMI decomposition and base image selection to extract and store non-redundant base image and software packages. Third, Expelliarmus can also assemble VMIs based on the required software packages upon user request. We evaluate Expelliarmus through a representative set of synthetic Cloud VMIs on the real test-bed. Experimental results show that our semantic-centric approach is able to optimize repository size by 2.2-16 times compared to state-of-the-art systems (e.g. IBM’s Mirage and Hemera) with significant VMI publish and retrieval performance improvement.

Keyword: Virtual machine image management, semantic similarity, storage optimization
Acknowledgement: The The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG, grant agreement 848448, Tiroler Cloud) and the European Union (Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, grant agreement 644179, ARTICONF) funded this work.

Nishant Saurabh

The poster “Towards a semantic-centric VMI repository management” has been accepted for presentation at PhD forum event of 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2019 to be held at Rio de Janerio, Brazil (May 20-24 2019)

Authors: Nishant Saurabh (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt), Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt)

Wir feiern das zweijährige Bestehen des Masterprogramms Game Studies and Engineering an der Universität Klagenfurt mit einer besonderen Abendveranstaltung. Am 22. Jänner laden wir Sie um 18.30 Uhr in den Hörsaal 4 ein, um gemeinsam mit Ihnen einen Blick auf bisher Geleistetes und in die Zukunft der Game Studies und ihre Rolle für die technologischen und sozialen Herausforderungen der Menschheit für das digitale Zeitalter zu werfen.

Highlight des Abends ist der Vortrag „Project Discovery: Designing Games for a Better World“ von Attila Szantner. Als CEO und Mitbegründer von Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) ist er spezialisiert darauf Videospiele mit dem Themenfeld der Citizen Science zu vereinen. Für sein Projekt Discovery, das Spieler der Weltraumsimulation EVE Online menschliche Zellen analysieren lässt und damit unter anderem positiv zur Krebsforschung beitragen konnte, wurde er mit dem renommierten Lovie Award ausgezeichnet. Abgerundet wird Herrn Szantners Vortrag von kurzen Präsentationen der Mitbegründer des Masterprogramms Game Studies and Engineering und ihren an der Universität verfolgten Projekten und Perspektiven.

Als internationales Masterprogramm wird die Veranstaltung auf Englisch stattfinden. Wir freuen uns auf Ihr erscheinen.

Please find the full AAU news blog article here.

On Sept. 3rd, 2018, ITEC met for the annual research day. This being the first time for a lot of people, we learned a lot of interesting things on the work, focus and result of our colleagues and were able to identify potential collaborations and joint efforts. Time before lunch was filled by Pecha Kucha style presentations and after lunch we came together in group discussions to identify and report overlaps and potentially beneficial collaborations.

Prof. Radu Prodan and Dr. Dragi Kimovski participate at “The 1st ACM SIGOPS Summer School on Advanced Topics in Systems” where with many proeminent speakers in the area of distributed systenms. They will also present a poster on their work on “A Nature-Inspired Adaptive Fog Architecture”.