COMPSs-Mobile: parallel programming for mobile-cloud computing

The advent of Cloud and the popularization of mobile devices have led us to a shift in computing access. Computing users will have an interaction display while the real computation will be performed remotely, in the Cloud. COMPSs-Mobile is a framework that aims to ease the development of energy-efficient and high-performing applications for this environment. The framework provides an infrastructure-unaware programming model that allows developers to code regular Android applications that, transparently, are parallelized, and partially offloaded to remote resources. This paper gives an overview of the programming model and describes the internal components of the toolkit which supports it focusing on the offloading and checkpointing mechanisms. It also presents the results of some tests conducted to evaluate the behavior of the solution and to measure the potential benefits in Android applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

SPAWN: Service Provision in Ad-hoc Wireless Networks

The increasing ubiquity of wireless mobile computing platforms has opened up the potential for unprecedented levels of communication, coordination and collaboration among mobile computing devices, most of which will occur in an ad hoc, on-demand manner. This paper describes SPAWN, a middleware supporting service provision in ad-hoc wireless networks. The aim of SPAWN is to provide the software resources on mobile devices that facilitate electronic collaboration. This is achieved by applying the principles of service oriented computing (SOC), an emerging paradigm that has seen success in wired settings. SPAWN is an adaptation and extension of the Jini model of SOC to ad-hoc networks. The key contributions of SPAWN are (1) a completely decentralized service advertisement and request system that is geared towards handling the unpredictability and dynamism of mobile ad-hoc networks, (2) an automated code management system that can fetch, use and dispose of binaries on an on-demand basis, (3) a mechanism supporting the logical mobility of services, (4) an upgrade mechanism to extend the life cycle of services, and (5) a lightweight security model that secures all interactions, which is essential in an open environment. We discuss the software architecture, a Java implementation, sample applications and an empirical evaluation of the system

Before-Commit Client State Management Services for AJAX Applications

Heavily script-based browser applications change the manner in which users interact with Web browsers. Instead of downloading a succession of HTML pages, users download a single application and use that application for a long period of time. The application is not a set of HTML pages, but rather a single page that can possible modify its own presentation based on data exchanged with a server. In such an environment, it is necessary to provide some means for the client to manage its own state. We describe the initial results of our work in providing client-side state management services for these script-based applications. We focus on browser-based services that can help the user before any data is committed on the server. Our services include state checkpointing, property binding, operation logging, operational replay, ATOM/RSS data updates, and application-controlled persistence

Context Aware Session Management for Services in Ad Hoc Networks

The increasing ubiquity of wireless mobile devices is promoting unprecedented levels of electronic collaboration among devices interoperating to achieve a common goal. Issues related to host interoperability are addressed partially by the service-oriented computing paradigm. However, certain technical concerns relating to reliable interactions among hosts in ad hoc networks have not yet received much attention. We introduce ”follow-me sessions”, where interaction occur between a client and a service, rather than a specific provider or server. We allow the client to switch service providers if needed. The redundancy offers scope for reliable communication in the presence of mobility induced disconnections. We exploit strategies involving the use of contextual information, strong process migration, context-sensitive binding, and location-agnostic communication protocols. We show how follow-me sessions mitigate issues related to proxy-based service-oriented architectures in ad hoc networks, making them more reliable

An Optimizing Java Translation Framework for Automated Checkpointing and Strong Mobility

Long-running programs, e.g., in high-performance computing, need to write periodic checkpoints of their execution state to disk to allow them to recover from node failure. Manually adding checkpointing code to an application, however, is very tedious. The mechanisms needed for writing the execution state of a program to disk and restoring it are similar to those needed for migrating a running thread or a mobile object. We have extended a source-to-source translation scheme that allows the migration of mobile Java objects with running threads to make it more general and allow it to be used for automated checkpointing. Our translation scheme allows serializable threads to be written to disk or migrated with a mobile agent to a remote machine. The translator generates code that maintains a serializable run-time stack for each thread as a Java data structure. While this results in significant run-time overhead, it allows the checkpointing code to be generated automatically. We improved the locking mechanism that is needed to protect the run-time stack as well as the translation scheme. Our experimental results demonstrate an speedup of the generated code over the original translator and show that the approach is feasible in practice

The Mojave Compiler: Providing Language Primitives for Whole-Process Migration and Speculation for Distributed Applications

We present an approach for implementing language-level primitives for whole-process migration and speculative execution in a compiler and associated runtime environment. These primitives are exposed to the user through simple language constructs that do not require the user to manage process state explicitly. With migration and speculation we show how the user can quickly add persistent checkpoints to any large-scale distributed application that requires longevity in a faulty environment. We demonstrate the use of migration and speculation primitives for checkpointing in a canonical grid computation application, and analyze the results of this implementation