On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons

Majority Quorum Protocol Dedicated to General Threshold Schemes

International audienceIn this paper, we introduce a majority quorum system dedicated to p-m-n general threshold schemes where p, n and m are respectively the minimal number of chunks that provide some information (but not necessarily all) on the original data, the total number of nodes in which the chunks of an object are stored and the minimal number of nodes needed to retrieve the original data using this protocol. In other words, less than p chunks reveal absolutely no information about the original data and less than m chunks can't reconstruct the original data. The p-m-n general threshold schemes optimize the usage of storage resources by reducing the total size of data to write and ensure fault-tolerance up to (n é m) nodes failure. With such a data distribution, a specific value of m can be set to have a good tradeoff between resources utilization and fault-tolerance. The only drawback of such schemes is the lack of any consistency protocol. If fact, consistency protocols like classical majority quorum are based on full replication. To successfully read or write a data using the majority quorum protocol, an absolute majority of replicas must be read / written correctly. This condition ensures that any read and write operations will contain at least one common replica, which guarantees their consistency. However, when a threshold scheme is used, an adaptation is needed. In fact, classical majority quorum protocol can no longer ensure that m chunks will have the latest version. In this paper, we introduce a new majority quorum protocol dedicated to general threshold schemes. As for the classical majority quorum protocol, the complexity of the quorum size of our protocol is O(n) but the utilization of storage resources is greatly optimized

EDGeS: a bridge between desktop grids and service grids

Desktop grids and service grids widely used by their different users communities as efficient solutions for making full use of computing power and achieving loads balances across Intranet or Internet. Nevertheless,little work has been done to combine these two grids technologies together to establish a seamless and vast grid resources pool. In this paper we will present a new European FP7 infrastructure project:EDGeS (enabling desktop grids for e-science), which aim to build technological bridges to facilitate interoperability between desktop grid and service grid. We give also a taxonomy of existing grid systems: desktop grids such as BONIC and XtremWeb, service grids such as EGEE. Then we describe furtherly our solution for identifying translation technologies for porting applications between desktop grids and service grids, and vice versa. There are three themes in our solution, which discuss actual popular bridging technologies, user access issues, and distributed data issues about deployment and application development

Distributed Visualization Systems in Remote Sensing Data Processing Grid

Implementation of GEOSS/GMES initiative requires creation and integration of service providers, most of which provide geospatial data output from Grid system to interactive user. In this paper approaches of DOS- centers (service providers) integration used in Ukrainian segment of GEOSS/GMES will be considered and template solutions for geospatial data visualization subsystems will be suggested. Developed patterns are implemented in DOS center of Space Research Institute of National Academy of Science of Ukraine and National Space Agency of Ukraine (NASU-NSAU)

Network-aware heuristics for inter-domain meta-scheduling in Grids

AbstractGrid computing generally involves the aggregation of geographically distributed resources in the context of a particular application. As such resources can exist within different administrative domains, requirements on the communication network must also be taken into account when performing meta-scheduling, migration or monitoring of jobs. Similarly, coordinating efficient interaction between different domains should also be considered when performing such meta-scheduling of jobs. A strategy to perform peer-to-peer-inspired meta-scheduling in Grids is presented. This strategy has three main goals: (1) it takes the network characteristics into account when performing meta-scheduling; (2) communication and query referral between domains is considered, so that efficient meta-scheduling can be performed; and (3) the strategy demonstrates scalability, making it suitable for many scientific applications that require resources on a large scale. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, and it is compared with other proposals from literature