DCU Joins €4.5 Million Consortium to Deliver Context-Aware Cloud Topology Optimisation and Simulation

Dublin City University (DCU) today announced it has joined a consortium of leading organisations and
universities from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany focused on using real-world data to
optimise and make more efficient cloud computing.

Named ‘CACTOS’, the €4.5 million project seeks to address issues arising from the growth and
complexity of cloud infrastructure. The Modelling and Simulation Research Group based in DCU
Business School will lead the research and development of the simulation framework (known as
CactoSim) which will validate the optimised models and evaluate the performance for management
of hosting on the cloud. The development of a CactoSim will allow for experimentation with and
validation of the performance of the developed intelligent context-aware cloud topology
optimisation strategies in a scalable (or large/massive scale) simulated environment, offering
significant benefit over the utilisation of testbeds which would be costly, time-consuming and
complex to perform.

Dr. James Byrne, Senior Researcher at the Modelling and Simulation Research Group based in DCU
Business School, said: “Controlled and reproducible experimentation with resource performance
scenarios and different workload mix can be enabled in CACTOS through the use of simulation. This
will enable both cost and risk analysis to be performed, as well as the tuning of potential system
bottlenecks.”

“Ultimately, it is hoped that by researching and developing the simulation toolkit within the CACTOS
environment this will result in more robust optimisation algorithms and enhanced decision support
for cloud infrastructure management. This will lead to cost savings and increased efficiency through
the use of the CACTOS toolkit. Gaining access to large scale data centres can be an issue from both a
cost and time perspective, and simulation will enable experimentation and evaluation on a large
scale without requiring such access.”

For more information go to www.cactosfp7.eu & www.sim.ie