First International Workshop on Cloud Computing Challenges for enabling the Internet of Things (CCC4IoT-2012)

The first International Workshop on Cloud Computing Challenges for enabling the Internet of Things (CCC4IoT-2012) is dedicated to the theories, practices and concepts of advancing Clouds to enable the realization of Future Internet and specifically, the Internet of Things (IoT).

During the last years, Clouds and inter-Clouds (an initiative to enable Clouds working together) are emerging as significant e-infrastructures for performing and delivering business and science. While Clouds are becoming popular by providing a new supplement, consumption, delivery and efficient Internet model, IoT has been emerged as a world-wide network of inter-connected physical objects uniquely addressable, based on standard communication protocols.

IoT is associated with technologies such as ad hoc networks, near-field communications, femtocells, real-time localization, and embedded tags and sensors as a way to transform everyday objects into smart objects which in turn, lead to a shared next generation Internet, what is also known as Future Internet. A notable opportunity - that is the CCC4IoT-2012 scope - is to what are the challenges for Clouds as facilitating e-infrastructures to meet the requirements towards an IoT realization. CCC4IoT-2012 aims to provide a forum for original discussion and prompt future directions on how to support the harvesting, storage, processing and exploitation of real-time and dynamically generated available inter-connected objects in a reliable, scalable and secure manner.

International Workshop on Clouds and (eScience) Applications Management (CloudAM 2012)

Cloud computing, virtualization and virtual (eScience) applications are currently hot topics and have been generating substantial interest in the community and it is anticipated that this interest will expand. It is also important to the research community as it is challenging traditional methods by its sheer size and high level of automation. Clouds must provide appropriate levels of performance to large groups of diverse users, and those clouds are accessed through virtualized wide area networks. Management systems are essential for that and thereby for the future success of the cloud paradigm. New systems, methods, and approaches for cloud, virtualization and (eScience) applications management are to be discussed at this workshop.

For the CloudApp 2012 workshop researchers from the Clouds and (eScience) Applications communities are encouraged to submit and present original work to be considered for publication.

The 2nd International Workshop on Intelligent Techniques and Architectures for Autonomic Clouds (ITAAC 2012)

Autonomic computing refers to principles and techniques for designing, building, deploying and managing computing systems with minimal human involvement. An autonomic system should be capable of adapting its behaviour to suit its context of use through methods of self-management, self-tuning, self-configuration, self-diagnosis, and self-healing.

Autonomic approaches are particularly suitable for use in Cloud Computing systems, where rapid scalability is required across a pool of resources to support various unpredictable demands, and where the system should automatically adapt to avoid failures in the underlying hardware impacting on the user experience. Autonomic Clouds emerge as a result of applying autonomic computing techniques to Cloud Computing, resulting into robust, fault tolerant and easy to manage and operate cloud architectures and deployments.

The application of intelligent approaches to Autonomic Clouds is gaining prominence in research and industry. Such intelligent approaches include evolutionary techniques, multi-objective and combinational optimization heuristics, genetic algorithms, neural networks, swarm intelligence, and multi-agents systems. Application of these intelligent approaches to Clouds can improve how computing systems and applications are built, used, managed and optimized, maximizing the benefits for users, applications and systems by reducing the operational, maintenance and usage costs of clouds. The interplay of intelligent approaches and Clouds offers numerous challenges.

The international workshop on Intelligent Techniques and Architectures for Autonomic Clouds (ITAAC 2011) aims to bring together researchers and practitioners across Cloud Computing, Intelligent Systems, and Autonomic Computing to discuss issues at the intersection of these disciplines. Key questions to be addressed include: How do emerging cloud architectures satisfy or contradict the vision of autonomic computing? How does the vision of autonomic computing satisfy the vision of self managing and self healing clouds? How do contemporary and emerging intelligent techniques support and enable both of these? Academics, researchers and practitioners are invited to submit original work on the theory and practice of intelligent and autonomic clouds.

3rd International Workshop on Green and Cloud Management (GCM'2012)

Cloud computing has become a very hot topic over the past few years. One of the main requirements in cloud computing environments is a high degree of automation for provisioning and dynamic management of IT resources (compute, storage and network resources) and services. Also, in cloud computing environment composed of large virtualized datacenters, energy consumption and carbon footprint have become major concerns which significantly impact resource management. The GCM workshop will focus on management and control issues related to dependability, scalabilitity, performance and configuration at each level of cloud computing infrastructures, but also on green computing issues in such environments like energy efficiency, carbon footprint reduction and cooling. This raises the issue of management automation for multi- criteria optimization (including Green metrics) at each level of a cloud environment.