Company name: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Website: http://www.vu.nl/nl/index.asp

Projects: Contrail

The Vrije Universiteit in AmsterdamThe Netherlands (VUA) has been founded in 1880. In research rankings, its Computer Science Department gets ranked first in The Netherlands and among the top within the European Union.

The Computer Systems group at the Vrije Universiteit is headed by Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. Its distributed systems activity follows two major strands of research: one on large-scale dis- tributed systems and one on high-performance distributed computing. The distributed systems group is headed by Prof. Maarten van Steen and Dr. Guillaume Pierre. The main emphasis is on the design, development, and evaluation of techniques for large-scale systems. The group has a long-standing tradition in systems research and is renowned for their work on Amoeba, Minix, and Globe. In the past decade, there has been a shift from traditional distributed sys- tems to systems that span the Internet and on topics concerning security, support of various kinds of wireless and wired networks, heterogeneity of participating nodes, scalable application hosting, and, above all, decentralization of processes, data, and control. The high-performance distributed computing group is headed by Prof. Henri Bal and Dr. Thilo Kielmann.

The research emphasis is on programming abstractions and efficient communication environments for high- performance applications, on clusters, grids, and cloud platforms. The group is internationally recognized for their work on the Orca parallel language, the MagPIe library, the Manta and Ibis platforms for high-performance Java, as well as their work on the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT), and the Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA).