ISSUE

06
April
2016

150

this issue

Using BonFIRE
Since BonFIRE was made

BonFIRE Open Access P.1

available to the public in

Fed4FIRE Experiments P.2

February 2013, we set up the

ECO2Clouds Results P.2

BonFIRE Foundation in
December 2013 to continue

Concluding the Journey P.2

to operate the facility without

public funding from the EC.
The Open Access initiative
has remained open and has
been very successful. We

BonFIRE Open Access

The Open Access initiative has been

SWAN, could handle large amounts of data

very successful since it was launched in

transferred between business partners under

February 2013. BonFIRE has been

different networking conditions. To do this, they

committed

this

utilised the controlled networking at the iMinds

initiative as long as possible, offering

Virtual Wall site to, inter alia, identify critical

The Open Access initiative is

free access to both industrial and

Quality of Service (QoS) thresholds for their

not the only way to access

academic institutions. We now mark the

application when varying latency and bandwidth.

BonFIRE. BonFIRE is also

conclusion of the BonFIRE Foundation

bwcon conducted an experiment in BonFIRE on

part of Fed4FIRE, the

and reflect here on the innovative work

the TTCN-3 test framework, with the purpose of

federation of FIRE facilities,

our users have done on BonFIRE.

conducting multi-Cloud testing. The experiment

have hosted 46 Open Access

experiments, 20 of which
were returning customers!

which leads to novel

experiments combining Cloud
functionalities with other
testbed services.

to

continue

to

run

By the end of 2015, BonFIRE had hosted 46 Open

Access experiments. 20 of these experiments were
returning customers. Also, along-side the Open
Access experiments, BonFIRE has been hosted

used the Open Cloud Computing Interface

(OCCI) of BonFIRE and the BonFIRE API for
testing elasticity scenarios on three sites in
BonFIRE, EPCC, Inria and HLRS.

users from both Fed4FIRE Open Call experiments

BonFIRE has also been used by other research

Of the Fed4FIRE Open Calls,

and the ECO2Clouds project, which we will return

projects via the Open Access initiative, such as

11 experiments have made

to on page 2 of this newsletter.

the RADICAL project. BonFIRE is used to deploy

use of BonFIRE:

In BonFIRE, we strive to provide advanced

Open Call 1 (July 13):

features and maximal control to our users, but also

5 out of 8 accepted

to make it easy to use. The number of returning

SME Call 1 (April 14):

1 out of 4 accepted
Open Call 2 (July 14):
3 out of 5 accepted
SME Call 2 (October 14):
2 out of 4 accepted

customers is testament to that. We cannot write

about all the experiments in BonFIRE, but will
describe

what

some

of

our

Open

Access

experimenters have done on BonFIRE below.

the RADICAL platform, which eases the fast

creation of interoperable and socially-aware
services, by leveraging the Internet of Things
(IoT)

and

Social

Networking

technologies

emerging from the results of four R&D ECfunded

projects;

SmartSantander,

SocIoS,

+Spaces and BonFIRE. This is a long-running

engagement with BonFIRE, beyond the usual 4-

SSC Services (software provider for Daimler)

month experiments supported in Open Access.
conducted an experiment in BonFIRE in order to
analyse how one of their software solutions,

You can read more about other experiments

online: http://www.bonfire-project.eu/innovation

BonFIRE Newsletter Issue 07 - Mar 2016

Key Facility
Features
6 geographically distributed
test-beds across Europe
accessed in a uniform
manner with single sign-on.

Heterogeneous Cloud

The six Fed4FIRE experiments from the

The

first (both general and SME) Open Call

developed strategies and mechanisms

that have used BonFIRE, have just

that can aid effective utilisation of

finished their work successfully. We

federated

describe a few of them here.

reducing energy consumption and CO2

resources, including
compute, storage and
networking.

deployment. Spec your

virtual machines as you wish
and control the deployment.

machines, allowing you to

experiment with contention.

resources

has

while

emissions of cloud applications.

and user resources for efficient and scalable
provisioning and operations of security services. As

explore best-practices and share the optimal

ECO2Clouds selected BonFIRE as platform to

perform the experiment for the following reasons:
BonFIRE

provided

an

out-of-the-box

federated multi-Cloud environment.

design with users to automatically provision and

manual

BonFIRE under its observability pillar it

intervention, while minimising the time required to

provides a complete monitoring solution

achieve this protection.

necessary

protect

virtual

SCS4FIRE

Exclusive access to physical

Cloud

project

IPCS4FIRE focused on the orchestration of cloud

a result of their experiment, they were able to

Full control of your resource

ECO2Clouds

machines

performed

without

experiments

on

the

validation of their Secure Cloud Storage system for

to

validate

the

scheduling

algorithms designed in the ECO2Clouds

project.

multi-cloud deployments. They optimized their

methodology to automate the transfer of virtual

Although

BonFIRE

provided

many

of

the

machines and encrypted data volumes between

necessary requirements for ECO2Clouds, the

multiple cloud sites, while maintaining continuous

later project extended BonFIREs monitoring

In-depth monitoring of virtual

access for end users.

solution in the following way:

machines, the physical

SSC researched big data analysis components on

machines and applications.

Smart City data using cloud resources. They were

able to validate that their Super Stream Collider
middleware

can

achieve

high

scalability,

Any BonFIRE experimenter can observe

the energy mix that a testbed in BonFIRE
is using at a given time.

Eco-metrics exposing energy

continuous accessibility and high performance, for

It is possible to obtain how much power is

consumption and CO2

more than 100.000 clients. The experimenters

consumed by any hosts or virtual machine

were returning customers from a previous Open

in BonFIRE.

emissions (from the

Access experiment.

ECO2Clouds project).
For more info, see: http://www.fed4fire.eu

Controlled networking by
setting up bespoke network
topologies, impairments and
background traffic.

For more info, see: http://eco2clouds.eu

Concluding the Journey

Six years after the project kick-off, BonFIRE concludes its successful journey
on 30 May 2016.
In this period we have delivered impact consistently, breaking new ground in FIRE at the

Ease of use for through

technical and sustainability fronts. Open Access has remained popular, with new and returning

multiple client tools - Portal,

users, like RADICAL renewing its Open Access for a third year.

Restfully, HTTP, Command

Utilisation was high, with EPCC and Inria at times completely full and oversubscribed. The

Line Interface Tools and

stability of the infrastructure has been remarkable, with two short, unplanned outages, both down

Experiment Descriptors.

to external factors.
On 30 May the services will be decommissioned and no further access will be possible. BonFIRE
will remain used until the last day. We have planned a BonFIRE demo at the Fed4FIRE EC
review in April 2016 and our experimenters will continue using it in these last few months.

For more information:

bonfire@bonfire-project.eu

We thank all our users for their continued interest in BonFIRE. We appreciate the support that we
received from the European Commission and our reviewers. We cherish the collaboration
between the partners and we hope we will be able to meet again in the near future.

http://www.bonfire-project.eu
2016 The University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, The University of Edinburgh, Atos and other members of the BonFIRE Foundation