A Generic Deployment Framework for Grid Computing and Distributed Applications

Deployment of distributed applications on large systems, and especially on grid infrastructures, becomes a more and more complex task. Grid users spend a lot of time to prepare, install and configure middleware and application binaries on nodes, and eventually start their applications. The problem is that the deployment process is composed of many heterogeneous tasks that have to be orchestrated in a specific correct order. As a consequence, the automatization of the deployment process is currently very difficult to reach. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a generic deployment framework allowing to automatize the execution of heterogeneous tasks composing the whole deployment process. Our approach is based on a reification as software components of all required deployment mechanisms or existing tools. Grid users only have to describe the configuration to deploy in a simple natural language instead of programming or scripting how the deployment process is executed. As a toy example, this framework is used to deploy CORBA component-based applications and OpenCCM middleware on one thousand nodes of the French Grid5000 infrastructure.Comment: The original publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co

Dynamic Services for Assisted Living Environments

Software technologies for assisted living systems can be derived from the more mature domain of pervasive computing and the relative emerging ambient intelligence field. We present herein our position about the need for interoperability enablers extending the software service paradigm and for dependability as key elements of assisted living software systems

Contributions aux systèmes répartis en environnements ubiquitaires : adaptation, sensibilité au contexte et tolérance aux fautes

D'années en années, nous observons l'arrivée sur le marche d'ordinateurs personnels de plus en plus petits pour des utilisateurs de plus en plus nombreux, ainsi des assistants personnels numériques et des objets dits connectés, en passant par les téléphones mobiles. Tous ces dispositifs tendent à être interchangeables du point de vue des ressources en mémoire, en calcul et en connectivité : par exemple, les téléphones mobiles sont devenus des équipements informatiques de moins en moins spécialisés ou de plus en plus universels et font dorénavant office en la matière de portails d'accès aux capteurs présents dans l'environnement immédiat de l'utilisateur. L'enjeu abordé dans nos travaux est la construction de systèmes répartis incluant ces nouveaux dispositifs matériels. L'objectif de mes recherches est la conception des paradigmes d'intermédiation génériques sous-jacents aux applications réparties de plus en plus ubiquitaires. Plus particulièrement, la problématique générale de mes travaux est la définition du rôle des intergiciels dans l'intégration des dispositifs mobiles et des objets connectés dans les architectures logicielles réparties. Ces architectures logicielles reposaient très majoritairement sur des infrastructures logicielles fixes au début des travaux présentés dans ce manuscrit. Dans ce manuscrit, je décris mes travaux sur trois sujets : 1) l'adaptation des applications réparties pour la continuité de service pendant les déconnexions, 2) la gestion des informations du contexte d'exécution des applications réparties pour leur sensibilité au contexte, et 3) les mécanismes de détection des entraves dans les environnements fortement dynamiques tels que ceux construits avec des réseaux mobiles spontanés. Sur le premier sujet, nous fournissons une couche intergicielle générique pour la gestion des aspects répartis de la gestion des déconnexions en utilisant une stratégie d'adaptation collaborative dans les architectures à base d'objets et de composants. Sur le deuxième sujet, nous étudions les paradigmes architecturaux pour la construction d'un service de gestion de contexte générique, afin d'adresser la diversité des traitements (fusion et agrégation, corrélation, détection de situation par apprentissage, etc.), puis nous adressons le problème de la distribution des informations de contexte aux différentes échelles de l'Internet des objets. Enfin, sur le troisième sujet, nous commençons par la détection des modes de fonctionnement pour l'adaptation aux déconnexions afin de faire la différence, lorsque cela est possible, entre une déconnexion et une défaillance, et ensuite nous spécifions et construisons un service de gestion de groupe partitionnable. Ce service est assez fort pour interdire la construction de partitions ne correspondant pas à la réalité de l'environnement à un instant donné et est assez faible pour être mis en oeuvre algorithmiquemen

DSL-Lab: a Low-power Lightweight Platform to Experiment on Domestic Broadband Internet

International audienceThis article presents the design and building of DSL-Lab, a platform to experiment on distributed computing over broadband domestic Internet. Experimental platforms such as PlanetLab and Grid'5000 are promising methodological approaches to study distributed systems. However, both platforms focus on high-end service and network deployments only available on a restricted part of the Internet, leaving aside the possibility for researchers to experiment in conditions close to what is usually available with domestic connection to the Internet. DSL-Lab is a complementary approach to PlanetLab and Grid'5000 to experiment with distributed computing in an environment closer to how Internet appears, when applications are run on end-user PCs. DSL-Lab is a set of 40 low-power and low-noise nodes, which are hosted by participants, using the participants' xDSL or cable access to the Internet. The objective is to provide a validation and experimentation platform for new protocols, services, simulators and emulators for these systems. In this paper, we report on the software design (security, resources allocation, power management) as well as on the first experiments achieved

Energy-QoS Tradeoffs in J2EE Hosting Centers

International audienceNowadays, hosting centres are widely used to host various kinds of applications e.g., web servers or scientific applications. Resource management is a major challenge for most organisations that run these infrastructures. Many studies show that clusters are not used at their full capacity which represents a significant source of waste. Autonomic management systems have been introduced in order to dynamically adapt software infrastructures according to runtime conditions. They provide support to deploy, configure, monitor, and repair applications in such environments. In this paper, we report our experiments in using an autonomic management system to provide resource aware management for a clustered application. We consider a standard replicated server infrastructure in which we dynamically adapt the degree of replication in order to ensure a given QoS while minimising energy consumption

Middleware specialization using aspect oriented programming

Standardized middleware is used to build large distributed real-time and enterprise (DRE) systems. These middleware are highly flexible and support a large number of features since they have to be applicable to a wide range of domains and applications. This generality and flexibility, however, often causes many performance and footprint overheads par-ticularly for product line architectures, which have a well-defined scope smaller than that of the middleware yet must leverage its benefits, such as reusability. To alleviate this tension thus a key objective is to specialize the middleware, which comprises removing the sources of excessive general-ity while simultaneously optimizing the required features of middleware functionality. To meet this objective this paper describes how we have applied Aspect-Oriented Program-ming (AOP) in a novel manner to address these challenges. Although AOP is primarily used for separation of concerns, we use it to specialize middleware. Aspects are used to se-lect the specific set of features needed by the product line. Aspect weaving is subsequently used to specialize the mid-dleware. This paper describes the key motivation for our research, identifies the challenges developing middleware-based product lines and shows how to resolve those using aspects. The results applying our AOP-based specialization techniques to event demultiplexing middleware for the case of single threaded implementation showed 3 % decrease in latency and 2 % increase in throughput, while in the thread pool implementation showed 4 % decrease in latency and 3% increase in throughput

State of the Art About Remote Laboratories Paradigms - Foundations of Ongoing Mutations

9 pages. Litterature review made fall 2007 on exisiting Remote Laboratories approaches and technologies.International audienceIn this paper, we provide a literature review of modern remote laboratories. According to this state-of-theart, we explain why remote laboratories are at a technological crossroad, whereas they were slugging for a decade. From various observations based on our review, we try to identify possible evolutions for the next generation of remote laboratories