Extending the Globus Information Service with the Common Information Model

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISPA.2011.62[Abstract] The need of task-adapted and complete information for the management of resources is a well known issue in Grid computing. Globus Toolkit 4 (GT4) includes the Monitoring and Discovery System component (MDS4) to carry out resource management. The Common Information Model (CIM) provides a standard conceptual view of the managed environment. This work improves the MDS4 functionality through the use of CIM, with the aim of providing a unified, standard representation of the Grid resources. Since a practical CIM model may contain a large volume of information, a new Index Service that represents the CIM information through Java instances is presented. In addition, a solution that keeps data in persistent storage has also been implemented. The evaluation of the proposed solutions achieves encouraging results, with an important reduction in memory consumption, a good scalability when the number of instances increases, and with a reasonable response time.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2007-67537-C03Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-1637

Designing a Resource Broker for Heterogeneous Grids

Grids provide uniform access to aggregations of heterogeneous resources and services such as computers, networks and storage owned by multiple organizations. However, such a dynamic environment poses many challenges for application composition and deployment. In this paper, we present the design of the Gridbus Grid resource broker that allows users to create applications and specify different objectives through different interfaces without having to deal with the complexity of Grid infrastructure. We present the unique requirements that motivated our design and discuss how these provide flexibility in extending the functionality of the broker to support different low-level middlewares and user interfaces. We evaluate the broker with different job profiles and Grid middleware and conclude with the lessons learnt from our development experience.Comment: 26 pages, 15 figure

A Framework for Ontology Reuse and Persistence Integrating UML and Sesame

Nowadays there is a great effort underway to improve the World Wide Web. A better content organisation, allowing automatic processing, leading to the Semantic Web is one of the main goals. In the light of bringing this technology closer to the Software Engineering community we propose an architecture allowing an easier development for ontology-based applications. Thus, we first present a methodology for ontology creation and automatic code generation using the widely adopted CASE UML tools. And based on a study of the art of the different RDF storage and querying systems, we couple this methodology with the Sesame system for providing a framework able to deal with large knowledge bases

The design and development of multi-agent based RFID middleware system for data and devices management

Thesis (D. Tech. (Electrical Engineering)) - Central University of technology, Free State, 2012Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has emerged as a key technology for automatic identification and promises to revolutionize business processes. While RFID technology adoption is improving rapidly, reliable and widespread deployment of this technology still faces many significant challenges. The key deployment challenges include how to use the simple, unreliable raw data generated by RFID deployments to make business decisions; and how to manage a large number of deployed RFID devices. In this thesis, a multi-agent based RFID middleware which addresses some of the RFID data and device management challenges was developed. The middleware developed abstracts the auto-identification applications from physical RFID device specific details and provides necessary services such as device management, data cleaning, event generation, query capabilities and event persistence. The use of software agent technology offers a more scalable and distributed system architecture for the proposed middleware. As part of a multi-agent system, application-independent domain ontology for RFID devices was developed. This ontology can be used or extended in any application interested with RFID domain ontology. In order to address the event processing tasks within the proposed middleware system, a temporal-based RFID data model which considers both applications’ temporal and spatial granules in the data model itself for efficient event processing was developed. The developed data model extends the conventional Entity-Relationship constructs by adding a time attribute to the model. By maintaining the history of events and state changes, the data model captures the fundamental RFID application logic within the data model. Hence, this new data model supports efficient generation of application level events, updating, querying and analysis of both recent and historical events. As part of the RFID middleware, an adaptive sliding-window based data cleaning scheme for reducing missed readings from RFID data streams (called WSTD) was also developed. The WSTD scheme models the unreliability of the RFID readings by viewing RFID streams as a statistical sample of tags in the physical world, and exploits techniques grounded in sampling theory to drive its cleaning processes. The WSTD scheme is capable of efficiently coping with both environmental variations and tag dynamics by automatically and continuously adapting its cleaning window size, based on observed readings

A RESTful Rule Management Framework for Internet of Things Applications

Web technologies are currently regarded as key enabling factors for the Internet of Things (IoT), and substantial effort is being dedicated to bringing sensors and data from the real world to the Web. In addition, rule-based automation mechanisms are expected to play a significant role in the effective integration of the physical world with the virtual world by leveraging a trigger-action paradigm. Although several rule engines are already available, limited effort has been devoted to rule-based solutions that are tailored to the IoT and consider rule configurability and extensibility according to application requirements. In this work, we propose a RESTful rule management framework for IoT applications that satisfies these requirements. The framework is centered around a resource-based graph, which enables the uniform representation of things (e.g., sensors and domain entities) and rules as URI-addressable resources. We describe the design and implementation choices of the main rule management features (rule scheduling, activation and RESTful operations for managing rules at various levels of configurability and extensibility). Finally, we present a case study and performance evaluation results regarding the use of this rule management framework in a set of school buildings that were part of a real-world IoT deployment that was realized within the Horizon 2020 GAIA research project, with the objective of promoting energy -saving behaviors in school communities

Research and development of accounting system in grid environment

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The Grid has been recognised as the next-generation distributed computing paradigm by seamlessly integrating heterogeneous resources across administrative domains as a single virtual system. There are an increasing number of scientific and business projects that employ Grid computing technologies for large-scale resource sharing and collaborations. Early adoptions of Grid computing technologies have custom middleware implemented to bridge gaps between heterogeneous computing backbones. These custom solutions form the basis to the emerging Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA), which aims at addressing common concerns of Grid systems by defining a set of interoperable and reusable Grid services. One of common concerns as defined in OGSA is the Grid accounting service. The main objective of the Grid accounting service is to ensure resources to be shared within a Grid environment in an accountable manner by metering and logging accurate resource usage information. This thesis discusses the origins and fundamentals of Grid computing and accounting service in the context of OGSA profile. A prototype was developed and evaluated based on OGSA accounting-related standards enabling sharing accounting data in a multi-Grid environment, the World-wide Large Hadron Collider Grid (WLCG). Based on this prototype and lessons learned, a generic middleware solution was also implemented as a toolkit that eases migration of existing accounting system to be standard compatible.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Stanford Universit