CloudFlow and UberCloud Announce Joint Effort
June 18 -- The EU funded project CloudFlow and the UberCloud today announce their close cooperation in the areas of community, technology and joint marketing. Both partners agree that their major task currently is building one community around engineering cloud service with members benefiting from cloud-related information, experimentation, and finally using cloud services for their daily business, on demand, as needed. Another major joint task is facilitating ease of access and use of high-performance cloud resources.
The objective of the EU funded project is to ease the access to computationally demanding virtual product development and simulation tools, such as CAD, CAM, CAE, and make their use more affordable by providing them as engineering Cloud services. CloudFlow envisages building a cloud system that is free from vendor lock-in to support SMEs in engineering and manufacturing, realising and expanding their potential onto cloud computing. There are essentially three types of user categories for CloudFlow. These are: end-users –who will be using application software that is available on the CloudFlow infrastructure; ii) software providers/vendors – who provide application software for end-users on the CloudFlow infrastructure; and iii) hardware providers/vendors –who provide high performance computing that supports the CloudFlow infrastructure.
In order to ensure that CloudFlow infrastructure fulfils the requirements from these groups of users, CloudFlow is based on a “wave-oriented approach to experiments.” The wave-oriented approach will generate a total number of 20 experiments (6, 7, and 7 experiments in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd wave, respectively) and cover five technological aspects, i.e. Data, Services, Workflows, Users and Business Models. This approach is necessary as it enables an investigation of the use of the CloudFlow infrastructure in new and innovative ways, reaching out to the engineering and manufacturing community and engaging external partners, especially European SMEs.
The UberCloud is a community and marketplace for engineers, scientists, and their service providers to discover, try, and buy computing and software on demand, in the cloud. More than 50 cloud providers and over 80 software vendors are supporting thousands of companies around the world with experimenting with their resources and services, to understand the end-to-end process of taking their applications to the cloud. The next step for the end-users then is to select and buy application related services from the UberCloud Marketplace. "Our mutual collaboration extends also to new technologies like Linux containers," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, president of the UberCloud. "CloudFlow applications can then instantly run on cloud resources within the project, and demonstrate the user-friendliness of such an approach."
CloudFlow is currently preparing its second OPEN CALL (3rd wave) for additional application experiments which will be open from June 30 to September 30 2015, with 1 Mio Euro budget available for future project partners. Application Experiments shall be rooted in computational technology for manufacturing and engineering industries, preferably SMEs. Priority will be given to innovative product development and products, such as mechatronic systems and cyber-physical systems, including, e.g., multi-domain simulation (mechanics, electronics, software, fluid dynamics, acoustics, etc.). “We would like to invite users and providers of engineering software all over Europe to participate in CloudFlow with the second open call, especially European SMEs and encouraging those situated from new European member states," explains Prof. Dr. Stork, Coordinator of the CloudFlow project.
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Source: UberCloud
