101 research outputs found
A Shibboleth-protected privilege management infrastructure for e-science education
Simplifying access to and usage of large scale compute resources via the grid is of critical importance to encourage the uptake of e-research. Security is one aspect that needs to be made as simple as possible for end users. The ESP-Grid and DyVOSE projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow are investigating security technologies which will make the end-user experience of using the grid easier and more secure. In this paper, we outline how simplified (from the user experience) authentication and authorization of users are achieved through single usernames and passwords at users' home institutions. This infrastructure, which will be applied in the second year of the grid computing module part of the advanced MSc in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, combines grid portal technology, the Internet2 Shibboleth Federated Access Control infrastructure, and the PERMS role-based access control technology. Through this infrastructure inter-institutional teaching can be supported where secure access to federated resources is made possible between sites. A key aspect of the work we describe here is the ability to support dynamic delegation of authority whereby local/remote administrators are able to dynamically assign meaningful privileges to remote/local users respectively in a trusted manner thus allowing for the dynamic establishment of virtual organizations with fine grained security at their heart
A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing
With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and
engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process
large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources.
Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex
workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of
workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a
taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and
executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid
workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the
comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design
and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid
workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure
Peer-to-Peer Metadata Management for Knowledge Discovery Applications in Grids
Computational Grids are powerful platforms gathering computational power and storage space from thousands of geographically distributed resources. The applications running on such platforms need to efïŹciently and reliably access the various and heterogeneous distributed resources they offer. This can be achieved by using metadata information describing all available resources. It is therefore crucial to provide efïŹcient metadata management architectures and frameworks. In this paper we describe the design of a Grid metadata management service. We focus on a particular use case: the Knowledge Grid architecture which provides high-level Grid services for distributed knowledge discovery applications. Taking advantage of an existing Grid data-sharing service, namely JuxMem, the proposed solution lies at the border between peer-to-peer systems and Web services
Novel mechanism for evaluating feedback in the grid environment on resource allocation
The primary concern in proffering an infrastructure for general purpose computational grids formation is security. Grid implementations have been devised to deal with the security concerns. The chief factors that can be problematic in the secured selection of grid resources are the wide range of selection and the high degree of strangeness. Moreover, the lack of a higher degree of confidence relationship is likely to prevent efficient resource allocation and utilization. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach for the secured selection of grid resources, so as to achieve secure execution of the jobs. The presented approach utilizes trust and reputation for securely selecting the grid resources by also evaluation user’s feedback on the basis of the feedback already available about the entities. The proposed approach is scalable for an increased number of resources
Experiences with the KOALA co-allocating scheduler in multiclusters
In multicluster systems, and more generally, in grids, jobs may require co-allocation, i.e., the simultaneous allocation of resources such as processors and input files in multiple clusters. While such jobs may have reduced runtimes because they have access to more resources, waiting for processors in multiple clusters and for the input files to become available in the right locations, may introduce inefficiencies. Moreover, as single jobs now have to rely on multiple resource managers, co-allocation introduces reliability problems. In this paper, we present two additions to the original design of our KOALA co-allocating scheduler (different priority levels of jobs and incrementally claiming processors), and we report on our experiences with KOALA in our multicluster testbed while it was unstable
Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures
This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production
distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic
understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was
created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not
complete, but we believe it is representative.
Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a
combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways
to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific
infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities
provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future
capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and
created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of
applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the
infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call
usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist
between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the
infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap-
plications by representing the infrastructures
Workflow Partitioning and Deployment on the Cloud using Orchestra
Orchestrating service-oriented workflows is typically based on a design model
that routes both data and control through a single point - the centralised
workflow engine. This causes scalability problems that include the unnecessary
consumption of the network bandwidth, high latency in transmitting data between
the services, and performance bottlenecks. These problems are highly prominent
when orchestrating workflows that are composed from services dispersed across
distant geographical locations. This paper presents a novel workflow
partitioning approach, which attempts to improve the scalability of
orchestrating large-scale workflows. It permits the workflow computation to be
moved towards the services providing the data in order to garner optimal
performance results. This is achieved by decomposing the workflow into smaller
sub workflows for parallel execution, and determining the most appropriate
network locations to which these sub workflows are transmitted and subsequently
executed. This paper demonstrates the efficiency of our approach using a set of
experimental workflows that are orchestrated over Amazon EC2 and across several
geographic network regions.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference
on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2014
Making distributed computing infrastructures interoperable and accessible for e-scientists at the level of computational workflows
As distributed computing infrastructures evolve, and as their take up by user communities is growing, the importance of making different types of infrastructures based on a heterogeneous set of middleware interoperable is becoming crucial. This PhD submission, based on twenty scientific publications, presents a unique solution to the challenge of the seamless interoperation of distributed computing infrastructures at the level of workflows.
The submission investigates workflow level interoperation inside a particular workflow system (intra-workflow interoperation), and also between different workflow solutions (inter-workflow interoperation). In both cases the interoperation of workflow component execution and the feeding of data into these components workflow components are considered.
The invented and developed framework enables the execution of legacy applications and grid jobs and services on multiple grid systems, the feeding of data from heterogeneous file and data storage solutions to these workflow components, and the embedding of non-native workflows to a hosting meta-workflow. Moreover, the solution provides a high level user interface that enables e-scientist end-users to conveniently access the interoperable grid solutions without requiring them to study or understand the technical details of the underlying infrastructure. The candidate has also developed an application porting methodology that enables the systematic porting of applications to interoperable and interconnected grid infrastructures, and facilitates the exploitation of the above technical framework
Experimentations With CoRDAGe, A Generic Service For Co-Deploying and Re-Deploying Applications On Grids
Computer grids are made of thousands of heterogeneous physical resources that belong to different administration domains. This makes the use of the grid very complex. In this paper, we focus on deploying distributed applications at a large scale. As the application requirements may often not be anticipated, dynamic re-deployment is needed; if various applications have to co-operate within a workïŹow, they should also be co-deployed in a consistent way. In a previous paper, we have described the CORDAGE deployment model and its architecture. It meets the three properties of transparency, versatility, and neutrality. We report in this paper on its application to a real co-deployment over the GRID'5000 experimental platform, using different conïŹgurations, including multiple clients, multiple applications and multiple grid sites
- âŠ