Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group

The Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at the Complutense University of Madrid conducts research in distributed and parallel computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to business and scientific problems.

Our research is characterized by an experimental, application-driven approach, addressing real needs and developing prototypes that could be used and evaluated by users. Methods and software developed by the group underpin many large high performance, grid, cloud and edge computing platforms for infrastructure virtualization, and compute intensive and big data processing.

No matter how powerful individual computers become, there are still reasons to harness the power of multiple systems, often spread across large geographic areas. Our research agenda is driven by the critical role distributed systems play in today’s society, research and business environments. The research group addresses the infrastructure platform challenges of large-scale, distributed systems in the efficient and scalable execution of compute- and data-intensive applications.

• Data-centric cloud architectures
• Cloud computing for edge analytics
• Distributed cloud computing
• Federated cloud networking
• High Performance Computing and Large-scale Data Processing on Cloud

More information about the open research lines in the Research Activities web page.

Since its foundation in 2002, the group has been involved in many research, development and innovation initiatives in Grid Computing, Cloud Computing and Big Data. The group has founded several leading research and development activities related to dynamic allocation and scheduling of jobs on Grid infrastructures (Globus GridWay Metascheduler), and dynamic management of virtual machines and interoperation across Cloud infrastructures (OpenNebula Cloud Management Platform).

The results of the research have been published in more than 200 papers in the leading journals and proceedings in the last seven years and incorporated in several technology products that have been transferred to the industry and the research community.

The members of the group actively participate in several Open Grid Forum groups and in the Program Committee of the most important workshops and conference related to parallel, distributed, grid and cloud computing. The group has participated in international Grid Projects like Globus Alliance, EGEE, BEinGRID and IGE, and in the main European projects in cloud computing, such as RESERVOIR, flagship of European research initiatives in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing, BonFIRE, 4CaaSt, StratusLab, PANACEA, CloudCatalyst, and BEACON.

Our research group has performed pioneering and leading work in the field of large-scale distributed systems for compute- and data-intensive applications.

• More than 200 papers published in the leading journals and proceedings that are among the most cited papers in the field of cloud computing.
• Participation in more than 10 European Union funded projects with an overall budget of over €100M and a direct budget assigned to the research group of over €5M, being the UCM research group with the largest budget funded by the European Union.
• Leadership roles in flagship European projects like RESERVOIR, main European project in cloud computing federation, and BEACON, main European project in federated cloud networking.
• Founder of several open-source projects, like OpenNebula that was the first open-source cloud management platform and now has several hundreds of users in industry and research. Some of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world, like the BlackBerry cloud with 300,000 cores and 16 data centers, run OpenNebula as their cloud management platform.
• Founder of standards groups, like OGF Working Group on Cloud Computing Interface.
• Participation in the main workshops, conferences and journals in the field.
• Collaborations with leading international research centers like NASA Langley, Berkeley Lab and Harvard University, and companies, like IBM, Telefonica and Microsoft.