The FEDERICA Project: creating cloud infrastructures

FEDERICA is a European project started in January 2008 that created a scalable, Europe-wide, clean slate, infrastructure to support experiments on Future Internet. The key architectural principle is virtualization both in computer systems and in network equipment and circuits. The project “slices” its substrate to offer “virtual infrastructures” (slices) made of computing elements and network resources to researchers. The user may fully configure the resources, including the slice topology. The slices can be seen as “cloud infrastructures”, generalizing the concept of “cloud computing” and enhancing that of “Infrastructure as a Service”. A section elaborates on the main open issues: reproducibility, resource description, monitoring and mapping of virtual resources to the physical substrate.