Overview

The background of the Lab is on distributed systems, currently in the context of cloud computing, with strong emphasis in scalability, high availability, databases, complex event processing, middleware,  service oriented architectures, and transactional information systems.

Research: The lab is active in different research fields: cloud computing, distributed systems, databases, web services, etc. Some of the lab main research results include scalable replicated database systems and scalable clustered application servers. The lab is currently doing substantial research to attain high levels of scalability of stateful servers, including databases and application servers.

Funding: The lab is funded by international (European Framework Programme and European EUREKA/ITEA programme), national (Ministry of Science and Education-MEC, and Ministry of Industry-MITyC) and regional public funding (CAM) in competitive calls as well as private funding. Private funding comes in the form of technology transfer contracts (e.g. Ericsson, Bull,  Telefonica) or research funding (e.g. awards from Microsoft Research Cambridge). The lab funding during the last 5 years amounts to over 5 Million Euro.

Equipment: The lab counts with a cluster 320 cores distributed in 100 nodes with 10G Myrinet 1G Ethernet and external storage in Storage Area Networks (SANs) from Coraid based on the new standard ATA-over-Ethernet.

European Projects: The lab is very active in European projects both in the Framework Programme (FP7) and EUREKA/ITEA programme.

Standards. The lab has also been active in standardization. The lab participated at different standards at OASIS (e.g. BPEL and WS-CAF) and JCP (Activity Service). Additionally, the lab has developed several reference implementation of standards such as BPEL, WS-CAF, OGSA-DAI, RowSet, Activity Service, Java Transaction Service, etc. Additionally, its research is developed in the framework of standards to enable a fast technology transfer to industry.

Technology Transfer: The lab is doing serious efforts towards transferring technology to national and European industry. In the area of databases it has developed a real-time sharded database for cellular telephony and transferred to Ericsson. In the area of application servers, the lab has developed the clustering of JOnAS, the ObjectWeb J2EE application server. The lab has licensed to Bull a BPEL visual composer, now commercialized as BSOA Orchestra. The lab is also working with Telefonica to develop a service-oriented data warehouse platform for federated organizations. The lab also is transferring technology through open source projects, like the JASS project on advanced transactional support for web services and J2EE hosted by ObjectWeb.

Patents: The lab is filing a patent a year during the last few years and working towards their industrial commercialization.

Getting to the Lab: Click here to see how to get to the lab