16,518 research outputs found
A Reliable and Cost-Efficient Auto-Scaling System for Web Applications Using Heterogeneous Spot Instances
Cloud providers sell their idle capacity on markets through an auction-like
mechanism to increase their return on investment. The instances sold in this
way are called spot instances. In spite that spot instances are usually 90%
cheaper than on-demand instances, they can be terminated by provider when their
bidding prices are lower than market prices. Thus, they are largely used to
provision fault-tolerant applications only. In this paper, we explore how to
utilize spot instances to provision web applications, which are usually
considered availability-critical. The idea is to take advantage of differences
in price among various types of spot instances to reach both high availability
and significant cost saving. We first propose a fault-tolerant model for web
applications provisioned by spot instances. Based on that, we devise novel
auto-scaling polices for hourly billed cloud markets. We implemented the
proposed model and policies both on a simulation testbed for repeatable
validation and Amazon EC2. The experiments on the simulation testbed and the
real platform against the benchmarks show that the proposed approach can
greatly reduce resource cost and still achieve satisfactory Quality of Service
(QoS) in terms of response time and availability
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
Checkpointing as a Service in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments
A non-invasive, cloud-agnostic approach is demonstrated for extending
existing cloud platforms to include checkpoint-restart capability. Most cloud
platforms currently rely on each application to provide its own fault
tolerance. A uniform mechanism within the cloud itself serves two purposes: (a)
direct support for long-running jobs, which would otherwise require a custom
fault-tolerant mechanism for each application; and (b) the administrative
capability to manage an over-subscribed cloud by temporarily swapping out jobs
when higher priority jobs arrive. An advantage of this uniform approach is that
it also supports parallel and distributed computations, over both TCP and
InfiniBand, thus allowing traditional HPC applications to take advantage of an
existing cloud infrastructure. Additionally, an integrated health-monitoring
mechanism detects when long-running jobs either fail or incur exceptionally low
performance, perhaps due to resource starvation, and proactively suspends the
job. The cloud-agnostic feature is demonstrated by applying the implementation
to two very different cloud platforms: Snooze and OpenStack. The use of a
cloud-agnostic architecture also enables, for the first time, migration of
applications from one cloud platform to another.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, appears in CCGrid, 201
Distributed Management of Massive Data: an Efficient Fine-Grain Data Access Scheme
This paper addresses the problem of efficiently storing and accessing massive
data blocks in a large-scale distributed environment, while providing efficient
fine-grain access to data subsets. This issue is crucial in the context of
applications in the field of databases, data mining and multimedia. We propose
a data sharing service based on distributed, RAM-based storage of data, while
leveraging a DHT-based, natively parallel metadata management scheme. As
opposed to the most commonly used grid storage infrastructures that provide
mechanisms for explicit data localization and transfer, we provide a
transparent access model, where data are accessed through global identifiers.
Our proposal has been validated through a prototype implementation whose
preliminary evaluation provides promising results
gcodeml: A Grid-enabled Tool for Detecting Positive Selection in Biological Evolution
One of the important questions in biological evolution is to know if certain
changes along protein coding genes have contributed to the adaptation of
species. This problem is known to be biologically complex and computationally
very expensive. It, therefore, requires efficient Grid or cluster solutions to
overcome the computational challenge. We have developed a Grid-enabled tool
(gcodeml) that relies on the PAML (codeml) package to help analyse large
phylogenetic datasets on both Grids and computational clusters. Although we
report on results for gcodeml, our approach is applicable and customisable to
related problems in biology or other scientific domains.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the HealthGrid 2012 con
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