GEYSERS

i2CAT Foundation is a not-for-profit Spanish organization founded by the UPC (Technical University of Catalonia) and the local government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya). i2CAT Foundation is an experimental platform for collaboration in research and development of IT projects between the public and private sector. It performs research and innovation projects under the scope of the new generation of Internet.
Currently i2CAT is involved in two major European projects, both related to networking (among many others national ones). I2CAT is the leader of work package 1 of the IST FP6 PHOSPHORUS project, a project that aims to treat the network as a first class grid resource allowing unified provisioning of network and grid resources. Its main involvement is developing the Harmony system, an architecture able to provide end-to-end provisioning services with advance reservation features on multi-technology and multi-domain networks. This goal is fundamentally performed by abstracting inter-domain topology from Network Resource Provisioning systems along the path, which is the only information visible to the end/administrative user.

Relevant expertise / know-how
Regarding the Future Internet topic, i2CAT is also co-leading a work package of the IST FP7 FEDERICA project, which aims to build a European-wide network that can be sliced. The control of each slice can be assigned to a different user, scoped to researchers dealing with Future Internet projects. i2CAT is mainly in charge of the studies about network resource processes abstraction, in order to create different virtual/segmented slices of the experimental L3 network infrastructure.
Among other projects, i2CAT has participated in both UCLPv1 and UCLPv2 projects in partnership with the Communications Research Centre of Canada and the University of Ottawa, with the support of CANARIE Inc. Research under these two projects paved the way to the IaaS Framework (Infrastructure as a Service), a framework for creating open source solutions enabling infrastructure resources as services to the user. The IaaS Framework is the basis of Argia and MANTICORE, two solutions for delivering IaaS to optical and IP networks, respectively.

Role in the project
I2CAT Foundation plans to contribute GEYSERS project in two main fronts. On the one hand, providing GEYSERS with the expertise acquired in long term collaboration with the Communications Research Centre in Canada regarding user-controlled networks and infrastructure partitioning and as active designers and developers of the Argia/IaaS software suite. On the other hand, i2CAT has been Work Package leader in IST-FP6 Phosphorus project both committing network infrastructure and hybrid optical test-bed and developing the Harmony system, a multi-domain, multi-vendor network resource broker integrated with the Grid middleware. The resources allocated to this project, both expertise and networking capabilities, will be brought to GEYSERS in addition to storage resources to be offered by MediaCAT centre (i2CAT’s multimedia research platform).
Moreover, i2CAT is activity leader in IST-FP7 FEDERICA project and several other national and international projects, as described above. Moreover, i2CAT is an active contributor to the standardisation working group named Network Service Interface, at the Open Grid Forum (OGF); and also is member of the Tele Management Forum (TMF). I2CAT will be leading Work Package 3 in GEYSERS, where the Logical Infrastructure Composition Layer will be designed, architected and implemented, as a proof of concept. Moreover, i2CAT plans to actively contributing to work packages 2, 4, 5 and 6.

CVs of key persons

Sebastià Sallent Ribes, Ph.D., Prof., received his PhD degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Catalonia Polytechnical University (UPC) in 1987He is professor in Telematics Engineering. He headed the Telematic Engineering Department at UPC and was leader of Computer Services at the Telecommunication Engineering School. He also was engaged in several projects with EU and ESA (European Space Agency), Apple, IBM, Sanyo, RACE II ACTS, Telematic (Teleregions) and several research projects funded by the Spanish Government related to broadband networks and multimedia. Author and co-author of 60 publications, supervisor of several proceedings, member and reviewer of the IEEE and More than 50 doctoral theses conducted. Nowadays he heads the i2CAT Foundation, Internet and Digital Innovation in Catalonia.

Sergi Figuerola, Ing., is the Coordinator of the Network Technologies Cluster of the i2CAT Foundation since 2004. He graduated in Telecommunication Engineering by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, January 2002), and holds a Masters in Project Management from La Salle (Universitat Ramón Llull, 2004). He is currently also acting as Work Package leader 1 of the PHOSPHORUS project (EC IP FP6) and JRA1 co-leader of the FEDERICA project (EC IP FP7) among its coordination of other national projects.

Eduard Grasa, Ph.D., had his Graduate in Telecommunication Engineering (UPC, July 2004) and Ph.D. (UPC, February 2009). In 2008 he joined i2CAT, where he is helping to technically coordinate the network technologies projects and research initiatives. He has participated in several research projects, including UCLPv1 and 2, FP6 PHOSPHORUS, FP7 FEDERICA, MANTICORE, IaaS Framework and others. His main areas of research are infrastructure as a service, network virtualization, virtualization management and optical network technologies.

Joan Antoni Garcia-Espin, Ing., is a network and software engineer at i2CAT Foundation. He had his Telecommunication Engineering degree from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2007. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate of the Wide-band Networking group (BAMPLA) in the Telematics Engineering Department (ENTEL) of the UPC. He participates in various international projects such as IST-FP6 PHOSPHORUS and IST-FP7 FEDERICA, and Spanish nationals.

Ing. Jordi Ferrer. Graduated in Computer Science in June 2009 at Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona (FIB), centre belonging to the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). He achieved the Telematic Networks and Operating Systems profile. He joins the Network Technologies Cluster of the i2CAT foundation as a software engineer in early 2007 for developing the MANTICORE (Making APN Network Topologies in the Internet COREs) project (2007-2008). In 2008 he starts his collaboration in the FP6 EU funded integrated project PHOSPHORUS (Lambda User Controlled Infrastructure for European Research) IST-034115. In 2009 he also starts working in the MANTICORE II project, an enhanced version of the first proof-of-concept prototype. He also collaborates with the GLIF Generic Network Interface Technical Group (GNI-TG), adapting the Harmony Service Interface (HSI) to the GNI specification. In 2010, he starts collaborating actively in the FP7 EU funded GEYSERS (Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastrucutre Services). He is currently a Ph. D. candidate of the Telematics Engineering Department of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). His research topics are focused on optical network virtualization, infrastructure as a service paradigm, on-demand broadband services, Grid and Cloud computing, dynamic hybrid resource allocation systems, and resource modelling.