E-Club

I have been giving classes in an Internet Apps Development course in the last semester. In fact, it was a little test. I have asked students to develop proposals for a small application with a commercial potential. They have prepared presentations and implemented prototypes. I think, they enjoyed a new approach: walking through the Cloud Computing technology, SaaS and prototype development. I also was surprised with the quality and number of good-looking prototypes. This has motivated me to go bigger. I have decided to start an Entrepreneurs Club and repeat almost the same but focus more on how to start real business. Our students, I believe, have a good technical background but do not have the guts and knowledge to go to the market. We have to fix it. Tomorrow is the day, keep the fingers crossed, I am meeting with an important group of investors asking them to support our effort. If all goes well we’ll get prize money for the best prototype proposal competition, which we will launch end of May. The first price is three months stay Silicon Valley incubator. Stay tuned for the next messages …

Welcome Filip

A friend of mine Filip Kolarik was admitted for the PhD program in my group. Certainly, he is a cloud-computing fan and I am looking forward to work with him. His major topic will be the RAD tools for cloud based web design. There are many we have played with. Now, we would like to start with deeper and more precise analysis. The current goal of the work is to design set of tools and platforms for fast authoring of web applications.

CTU virtualization

There are several computer classrooms in our buildings at CTU Karlovo namesti. The computers are used by students throughout the day, but they are idling at night. The CPM group does research in image processing and all their experiments are very computationally and memory intensive. How to take advantage of the at night idling computers for scientific computation? There are several ways how to make the computers available while making sure the current set up for education, data and operating systems are intact. Our approach is virtualization and cloud computing. To start the project we have decided to proceed safely creating new partition and use dual boot. This will preserve the current computers settings and let us use the new partition for the cloud software and virtualization. The partition job has been done this week. The plan is to test two different virtualization approaches VMware and Eucalyptus. WMware tools will let us manage virtualized images on many computers in cluster. Similarly works the open source Eucalyptus. The WMware uses the XEN and Eucalyptus the KVN and others. Both will allow us to manage and run many different tasks. Next, we will start installing the system. Stay tuned for the next report.