A joint design research project (HES-SO) between ECAL, HEAD, EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL
While setting up our own small size data center and cloud infrastructure, we’ve tried to exemplify the key constitutive ingredients of this type of computing infrastructure, as of November 2014. But we’ve also tried to maintain them as much open as we could, for further questioning, developments and transformations.
The first key ingredients are software parts and we’ve described them in the previous post about the same topic.
Following Patrick’s post about our different options for choosing a “Cloud” software and the one that we finally made by choosing ownCloud. Here are a few related comments that develop our point of view and technical choices.
ArkOs, Openstack and RiakCS all take the hand over an entire server/system/computer, offering a kind of embedded linux system within a human-friendly interface, the kind of mechanism one can find on ready-to-use NAS (Network Attached Storage) hardware.
Basically, it transforms any regular computer into a NAS device. One of the key points about the structure we are trying to setup is to be able to host anything we would like/need or may appear interesting to probe. That includes our own website(s), web services in order to feed projects with data and any kind of applications that may be useful to try and develop within the frame of this research.
We do need therefore to keep the research server as generic as possible by using a normal linux distribution, which we can then enhance by any set of additional services. While ArkOS, Openstack and RiakCS are of course interesting projects, at some point, it may become already too specific for our goals.
Owncloud appears to be a simple web site structure dedicated to file sharing. As mentioned in my previous post, Owncloud proposes a set of APIs that allow the access to Owncloud features while being able to develop our own applications. Thus, these applications can rely on Owncloud while being hosted on a heterogeneous set of devices, network connected.
On the way to the development of different artifacts for the design research (Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s)), we’ll need to work with our own “personal cloud”. The first obvious reason is that we’ll need a common personal platform to exchange research documents, thoughts and work together between the different (geographically distributed) partners involved in the project. We are thus our own first case study. The second one is to exemplify the key components about how a small data center / cloud infrastructure might be assembled today and learn from it.
But then, more importantly, this will become necessary for two other main objectives: first one is that we would like to give access to “cloud” tools to the design, architecture and makers communities, so that they can start play and transform a dedicated infrastructure (and this won’t of course be possible with all type of systems); second one will possibly be for the “hands on” and “prototyping” parts of our research, for which we’ll need an accessible cloud based architecture to modify or customize (this includes both the software and hardware), around which some open developments, networked objects, new interfaces, apps, etc. could be developed.
RAID (originally redundant array of inexpensive disks; now commonly redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy or performance improvement.[1]
Even if unfortunately Bergcloud is a dead project now (and that it sadly brought down the design collective Berg too), I mention it here on our research blog as it probably has some connections with our own research project and what we might try to develop later as tools. The unsuccessful commercial approach of Bergcloud to connected objects should also be taken as a question toward this big “buzz” though.
Note: an interesting “documentary” project/resource for our project is this recent work by designer and researcher Timo Arnall. It was published last May on his website and on different blogs. The focus is obviously here on the data center as a (fascinating?) contemporary artifact, in which the search for technical efficiency, rationality, security, redundancy, clean air, modularity, etc. leads to a specific spatial aesthetic. It is this aesthetic that seems to become the “main character” for this movie that mixes techniques, even so the idea is to reveal/desacralize the “hidden materiality of our data”. This project is planned to be displayed as a multi-screen installation.
While I didn’t have the occasion to see the movie yet, we should keep it in mind and try to display it in the frame of our own research, in particular to the students that will take part to the different I&IC workshops.
Via elasticspace
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Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.
Film: 6 min 40 sec, digital 4K, 25fps, stereo.
Installation: Digital projection, 3 x 16:10 screens, each 4.85m x 2.8m.
Medium: Digital photography, photogrammetry and 3D animation.
The Creative Time Report has a piece on cloud infrastructures and the public’s right to understand it. The author interestingly describe her discoveries:
In trying to see where data lives, I hoped to better understand how we live with data and, by extension, with the myriad forms of surveillance that it enables. We live with data by pretending that we don’t. The opacity of internet infrastructure and policy—and the insistence that ideally users shouldn’t need to see or understand either—occludes data, the institutions that hold it and the power they exercise with it. Ultimately, in a geography of power, the cloud is not the territory.
... Along the design research, we are going through many different types of references that we don't necessarily post or document ...
The website presenting the downloadable results of the joint design and ethnographic research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) is now ...