The BonFIRE Foundation

The BonFIRE Foundation was established in December 2013 to operate the BonFIRE multi-site Cloud testing facility. The BonFIRE Foundation comprised members from world-leading industrial and academic partners, dedicated to continue to deliver services that enable developers to research new, faster, cheaper, or more flexible ways of running applications with new business models. The BonFIRE broker IaaS+ solution allowed access to multiple cloud providers and test services. Since the BonFIRE Foundation establishment, we supported more than 20 organisations to test their software prototypes and validate their multi-Cloud application scenarios.

The BonFIRE Foundation ran the BonFIRE multi-site Cloud facility until May 2016 via two committees; one focusing on strategic development, and one dealing with the day-to-day operation of the facility.
BonFIRE Foundation Members
Josep Martrat

TMT Market Manager, Research & Innovation, Atos
Kostas Kavoussanakis

Project Manager, EPCC, The University of Edinburgh
Michael Boniface

Technical Director, IT Innovation Centre, University of Southampton
David Margery

Technical Director for Grid'5000, Inria, Rennes
Bastian Koller

Manager of HLRS, University of Stuttgart
Tim Wauters

Project Manager, iMinds, Ghent University
PSNC
 Bartosz Belter

Head of Network R&D, Poznan Super Computing and Networking
Center

BonFIRE Operations Members
David Garcia Perez

Functional Analyst, Research & Innovation, Atos
Gareth Francis

Systems Developer, EPCC, The University of Edinburgh
Vegard Engen

Senior Research Engineer, IT Innovation Centre, University of Southampton
Julien Lefeuvre

R&D Engineer, Inria, Rennes
Michael Gienger

Head of Service Management & Business Processes Group, HLRS, University of Stuttgart
Gregory Van Seghbroeck
Senior Researcher, iMinds, Ghent University
PSNC Michał Giertych

Researcher, Poznan Super Computing and Networking Center

The BonFIRE Project: A Brief History

Before the BonFIRE Foundation was established to run the BonFIRE multi-site Cloud facility, it was developed and operated within the BonFIRE project (Building service testbeds for Future Internet Research and Experimentation). The project was funded by the EC FP7 under grant agreement number 257386, with a contribution of 7,2M Euro, including 1,34M Euro for 2 open calls for experiments, and ran from June 2010 to December 2013.

The initial core BonFIRE consortium brought together world leading industrial and academic organisations in cloud computing to deliver a robust, reliable and sustainable facility for large scale experimentally-driven cloud research. Multinational companies (ATOS, HP, SAP), renowned universities and super computing centres (UCM, EPCC, HLRS Stuttgart, iMinds, TUB), research centres (IT Innovation, FhG Fokus, Inria, i2CAT) and technology analysts (451 Group) provided the complimentary expertise and infrastructure resources necessary to accelerate the research and development within the Internet of Services community.

In September 2011, the consortium was extended to include PSNC and NextWorks to develop the networking features of BonFIRE. As a result of the 1st open call, the consortium was also extended in September 2011 to include additional research centres and companies using the facility for cloud computing research, namely University of Manchester, CESGA, CETIC, Cloudium Systems and RedZinc.

As a result of the 2nd open call, the consortium was extended again in September 2012 to include additional research centres and companies using the facility for cloud computing research, namely ICCS/ National Technical University of Athens, Televes SA, MTA SZTAKI, IN2, University of Patras and Cloud Provider Wellness Telecom to become an additional BonFIRE site.