Research Group : Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms
Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms at BSC-CNS
The aim of this department is to research autonomic and intelligent resource management for today’s business applications. The objective is to create new components at middleware level that provides holistic solutions for some of the new IT challenges in the industry: Cloud Computing, Big Data, Business Analytics, High Performance Computing or Sustainable Computing.
Cloud Computing will undoubtedly be the platform that will dominate the Business applications during the next decade. A Cloud can be composed of different types of platforms (heterogeneous clusters of hybrid hardware) and organizations (private, public, hybrid). These will interact with millions of smart electronic devices and sensors that will generate a huge amount of data. Furthermore it needs to evolve very fast in order to meet the new requirements of new heterogeneous business workloads. These include different types of jobs, like CPU-intensive, streaming, transactional, and especially data-intensive jobs.
In this scenario new requirements arise: Performance/Latency/Scalability, Availability/Reliability/Consistency, Energy/Power, Privacy/Security amongst others. This has produced huge challenges for IT Resource Management.
For BSC, Self-management is considered to be the solution to this complexity and a way to increase the adaptability of the execution environments to the dynamic behaviour of the reality dictated by this new paradigm.
We are considering that the current workloads that we should deal with are heterogeneous, including different types of jobs, not only CPU-intensive jobs, but also streaming, transactional, data-intensive, etc. Regarding the resources, the current hardware that we should consider includes heterogeneous clusters of hybrid hardware (with different types of chips, accelerators, GPUs, …).
The group at BSC-CNS was created in 2005 based on the previous experience of the Barcelona eDragon Research Group, that was created together with Professor Eduard Aygudé and myself as part of the High Performance Computing group in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC in 1999. The group started to work in the Java arena under the CEPBA (European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona) and developped the Barcelona Java Suite (BJS). BJS was a platform to do research on scheduling mechanisms and policies oriented towards the efficient execution of multithreaded Java applications on parallel platforms, in which the interactions and coordination between mechanisms and policies at different levels (application, compiler, threads library and kernel) was studied. Later, with the creation of the CIRI (CEPBA-IBM 
Research Institute) the group started to work with web based applications conducting fundamental research in the area of performance of eBusiness applications and complex systems in execution on powerful platforms.
More detail can be found in our group web page at BSC.
Reseach team (updated 03/2011) :
- Eduard Ayguadé (eduard.ayguadé@bsc.es)
- Javier Alonso (javier.alonso@bsc.es)
- Yolanda Becerra (yolanda.becerra@bsc.es)
- Vicenç Beltran (vbeltran@bsc.es)
- Ricardo Bianchini (ricardo.bianchini@bsc.es)
- David Carrera (david.carrera@bsc.es)
- Jordi Guitart (jordi.guitart@bsc.es)
- Iñigo Goiri (inigo.goiri@bsc.es)
- Cristian González (cristian.gonzalez@bsc.es)
- Mario Macías (mario.macias@bsc.es)
- Josep Oriol Fitó (josep.oriol@bsc.es)
- Gemma Reig (gemma.reig@bsc.es)
- Zeus Gomez (zeus.gomez@bsc.es)
- Valèria Quadros (valeria.quadros@bsc.es)
- Jordà Polo (jorda.polo@bsc.es)
- Josep Subirats (josep.subirats@bsc.es)
- Juan Luis Pérez (juan.perez@bsc.es)
- Jordi Torres (jordi.torres@bsc.es)
Past Contributors in our research (thank you to all of them):
- Ramon Nou (Graduate Student / PhDStudent)
- Jordi Caubet (Researcher IBM Staff)
- Kevin Hogan (Researcher, BSC Staff)
- Toni Moreno (BSC staff, and PhD Student)
- Liangxiao Zhu Wang (Undergraduate Student)
- Joan Garcia (Undergraduate Student)
- Guillem Frances (Undergraduate Student)
- Jesús Labarta (BSC R&D Director)
- Lídia Montero (Associate Professor, Dept. EIO, UPC)
- David Garcia (Graduate Student)
- Jordi Palau (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- José Oliver (Graduate Project Assistant, UPC)
- Xavier Martorell (Associated Professor, CEPBA-UPC)
- J. Mark Bull (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center – EPCC)
- Javier Bartolomé (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- Juan Antonio Pérez (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- Marc Lopez (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- Joan Delgado (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- Ignasi Mieza (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- Manuel López (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
- Xavier Aguilar (Undergraduated Project Assistant, UPC)
(ICAC poster , 2006)