Ricardo Vilaça

CoherentPaaS (FP7)

The CoherentPaaS Project is a European FP7 IP 2013-2016 (€5 million) with U. Madrid (leader), INRIA Zenith, FORTH, ICCS, INESC TEC and the companies MonetDB, QuartetFS, Sparsity, Neurocom, Portugal Telecom.

CumuloNimbo (FP7-257993)

March 2011-Current : CumuloNimbo: Highly Scalable Transactional Multi-Tier

CumuloNimbo is a European project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Programme Framework (FP7) that targets to obtain a highly scalable transactional platform as a service (PaaS). One of the innovations will be attaining scalability without trading off consistency as it is the norm in today's PaaS.

I' m designing and developing the CumuloNimbo’s Query Engine layer that is responsible for taking an SQL query and generating an efficient execution plan for the query, to be executed over the tuple store layer. For this, I had identified several fundamental design modifications to an existing SQL query engine (Derby), allowing it to be distributed and efficiently run SQL on top of a scalable data store (HBase) while being able to scale with the data store. I had also done the preliminary evaluation of the prototype using both standard benchmarks for relational databaes (TPC-W e TPC-C) and NoSQL databases (YCSB - https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB).

Stratus (PTDC/EIA-CCO/115570/2009)

March 2011 - Present : Stratus: A Layered Approach to Data Management in the Cloud

I have defined a novel correlation-aware placement strategy that considers arbitrary tags on tuples and combines the usage of a Space Filling Curve (SFC) with random partitioning to store and retrieve correlated tuples. I have also designed DataDroplets, a flexible, efficient, dependable and fully decentralized key-value store for the management of data in a Cloud Environment. DataDroplets shifts the current trade-off of Cloud based tuple stores towards the needs of common business users, providing additional consistency guarantees and higher level data processing primitives smoothing the migration path for existing applications. I also developed a working prototype of DataDroplets with implementations of the novel and state of the art data placement strategies for key-value stores.

COSS - Gestão Integrada de Serviços Cloud com os Sistemas de Suporte às Operações (Plano de Inovação PT Inovação 2011-2013)

Co-supervise the research grant holder that is working on the monitoring and elasticity support for OpenStack and also implement the JCloud driver for the Cloud platform from Portugal Telecom, SmartCloud PT.

OSS (Plano de Inovação PT Inovação 2011-2013)

October 2011 - Present : OSS - Aprovisionamento de Serviços Cloud Computing

Cosupervise the research grant holder that is working on the installation and maintenance of OpenStack, a massively scalable cloud operating system (http://www.openstack.org/). Design of an abstract model for the management of computing instances independent of the Cloud provider and development of a Web portal for the supply of resources, both computing and storage, in the Cloud.

CC (Plano de Inovação PT Inovação 2010-2012)

June 2010 - May 2011: CC - Cloud Computing em Data Centers

Studied the viability of using NoSQL databases as complementary solutions to traditional relational database management systems to achieve scalability and elasticity in telecom applications.

GORDA (FP6-IST2-004758)

2006-2008 : Open Replication of Databases

The goal of the GORDA project is to foster database replication as a means to address the challenges of trust, integration, performance, and cost in current database systems underlying the information society. This is to be achieved by standardizing architecture and interfaces, and by sparking their usage with a comprehensive set of components ready to be deployed. GORDA is Supported by the European Community under the Sixth European Union Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, thematic priority Information Society Technologies.

I participated: in the design of the GAPI (http://gorda.di.uminho.pt/community/gapi/) mainly in the recovery interfaces; design and implementation of the recovery protocols and in the integration with the group communication toolkits in Escada Replication Server (http://escada.sourceforge.net/) and in the design and implementation of the Sequoia (http://sequoia.continuent.org/) GAPI implementation.