NEWS The Autonomous Distributed Systems Lab at Umeå University is a hub for cloud experts. This year's workshop brought together more than 100 researchers. "Modern systems are growing in scale and complexity. At the same time, demands for performance, security, availability and reliability are increasing. Meeting like this, help us to remain at the forefront. We were honoured that the interest was so high", says Erik Elmroth, Professor of Computing Science at Umeå University.
30 professors, 26 business representatives and a significant number of lecturers, researchers and PhD students discussed the future of cloud solutions during the 17th Cloud Control Workshop, organised by the internationally established research group ADS Lab, at Umeå University.
ImageADS LabStreaming, healthcare, financial systems, gaming, internet-of-things and autonomous vehicles. All depend on the clouds that store and manage data. It is an infrastructure that is central to virtually every field – medicine, business, transport and the public sector.
“We are committed to ensuring that this technology is as efficient and secure as possible. Smart cities, autonomous vehicles and state-of-the-art healthcare will be guided by automated systems, which require software that can run directly in the clouds," says Erik Elmroth, Professor of Computing Science, who leads the internationally established Autonomous Distributed Lab research group at Umeå University.
The 17th Cloud Control Workshop, was joined by 109 specially invited participants from 18 countries; 30 professors, 26 people from industry, and many lecturers, researchers, and PhD students. At the workshop, participants focused on discussing methods and systems for optimal management of resources and applications in and for the cloud.
“We are seeing rapid developments. There's a need for both large data centres and resources, closer to the end user and data sources, to allow systems to communicate with each other and securely handle data in a timely manner, without failures. It is satisfying to have the opportunity to discuss both challenges and opportunities, and to find new possibilites for co-operation," Elmroth says.
The Autonomous Distributed Lab research group has been central to Sweden's largest research programme WASP, Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program, for some years now. The researchers in Umeå are experts in the automation of clouds and their components – from individual servers to large-scale cloud data centres.
"Clouds are typically built as federations of large-scale data centres and are sometimes complemented by small resources, called edge resources, close to the users or data sources," says Professor Elmroth. "We work to ensure that the processes work optimally, so that the services running in the cloud are as available and reliable as possible with minimal energy consumption and environmental impact.”
The specially invited participants come from a spectrum of scientific disciplines with a common interest in improving methods and software systems.
“They include experts from areas such as computer systems, control engineering, machine learning and autonomous systems, to energy management, mathematical statistics and performance modelling, as well as software engineering and systems management. Of course, we are honoured that the interest was so large", says professor Elmroth.
Distributed systems today form the basis of virtually all IT systems. “We are working on developing new energy-efficient solutions and the accelerating growth of the Internet of Things, in the form of the Mobile Edge Cloud, where data processing is done closer to the end-user and where data is downloaded. Another important aspect is security and the ability to quickly identify when things go wrong. Here we are now successfully working on tracking and diagnosing system problems," says Erik Elmroth.
Please contact Professor Erik Elmroth by e-mail.
Erik Elmroth has established Umeå University's research on distributed systems. He is a member of the Executive Committee and four other management groups of the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program, and one of the research leaders of eSSENCE. Professor Elmroth is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Read more about Professor Elmroth here.
