QoS Provisioning by Meta-Scheduling in Advance within SLA-Based Grid Environments

The establishment of agreements between users and the entities which manage the Grid resources is still a challenging task. On the one hand, an entity in charge of dealing with the communication with the users is needed, with the aim of signing resource usage contracts and also implementing some renegotiation techniques, among others. On the other hand, some mechanisms should be implemented which decide if the QoS requested could be achieved and, in such case, ensuring that the QoS agreement is provided. One way of increasing the probability of achieving the agreed QoS is by performing meta-scheduling of jobs in advance, that is, jobs are scheduled some time before they are actually executed. In this way, it becomes more likely that the appropriate resources are available to run the jobs when needed. So, this paper presents a framework built on top of Globus and the GridWay meta-scheduler to provide QoS by means of performing meta-scheduling in advance. Thanks to this, QoS requirements of jobs are met (i.e. jobs are finished within a deadline). Apart from that, the mechanisms needed to manage the communication between the users and the system are presented and implemented through SLA contracts based on the WS-Agreement specification

A Service-Oriented Approach for Network-Centric Data Integration and Its Application to Maritime Surveillance

Maritime-surveillance operators still demand for an integrated maritime picture better supporting international coordination for their operations, as looked for in the European area. In this area, many data-integration efforts have been interpreted in the past as the problem of designing, building and maintaining huge centralized repositories. Current research activities are instead leveraging service-oriented principles to achieve more flexible and network-centric solutions to systems and data integration. In this direction, this article reports on the design of a SOA platform, the Service and Application Integration (SAI) system, targeting novel approaches for legacy data and systems integration in the maritime surveillance domain. We have developed a proof-of-concept of the main system capabilities to assess feasibility of our approach and to evaluate how the SAI middleware architecture can fit application requirements for dynamic data search, aggregation and delivery in the distributed maritime domain

Interoperating Grid Infrastructures with the GridWay Metascheduler

This paper describes the GridWay Metascheduler and exposes its latest and future developments, mainly related to interoperability and interoperation. GridWay enables large-scale, reliable and efficient sharing of computing resources over grid middleware. To favor interoperability, it shows a modular architecture based on drivers, which access middleware services for resource discovery and monitoring, job execution and management, and file transfer. This paper presents two new execution drivers for BES and CREAM services, and introduces a remote BES interface for GridWay. This interface allows users to access GridWay’s job metascheduling capabilities, using the BES implementation of GridSAM. Thus, GridWay now provides to end-users more possibilities of interoperability and interoperation

3rd EGEE User Forum

We have organized this book in a sequence of chapters, each chapter associated with an application or technical theme introduced by an overview of the contents, and a summary of the main conclusions coming from the Forum for the chapter topic. The first chapter gathers all the plenary session keynote addresses, and following this there is a sequence of chapters covering the application flavoured sessions. These are followed by chapters with the flavour of Computer Science and Grid Technology. The final chapter covers the important number of practical demonstrations and posters exhibited at the Forum. Much of the work presented has a direct link to specific areas of Science, and so we have created a Science Index, presented below. In addition, at the end of this book, we provide a complete list of the institutes and countries involved in the User Forum

An SOA-based model for the integrated provisioning of cloud and grid resources

In the last years, the availability and models of use of networked computing resources within reach of e-Science are rapidly changing and see the coexistence of many disparate paradigms: high-performance computing, grid, and recently cloud. Unfortunately, none of these paradigms is recognized as the ultimate solution, and a convergence of them all should be pursued. At the same time, recent works have proposed a number of models and tools to address the growing needs and expectations in the field of e-Science. In particular, they have shown the advantages and the feasibility of modeling e-Science environments and infrastructures according to the service-oriented architecture. In this paper, we suggest a model to promote the convergence and the integration of the different computing paradigms and infrastructures for the dynamic on-demand provisioning of resources from multiple providers as a cohesive aggregate, leveraging the service-oriented architecture. In addition, we propose a design aimed at endorsing a flexible, modular, workflow-based computing model for e-Science. The model is supplemented by a working prototype implementation together with a case study in the applicative domain of bioinformatics, which is used to validate the presented approach and to carry out some performance and scalability measurements

Deliverable JRA1.1: Evaluation of current network control and management planes for multi-domain network infrastructure

This deliverable includes a compilation and evaluation of available control and management architectures and protocols applicable to a multilayer infrastructure in a multi-domain Virtual Network environment.The scope of this deliverable is mainly focused on the virtualisation of the resources within a network and at processing nodes. The virtualization of the FEDERICA infrastructure allows the provisioning of its available resources to users by means of FEDERICA slices. A slice is seen by the user as a real physical network under his/her domain, however it maps to a logical partition (a virtual instance) of the physical FEDERICA resources. A slice is built to exhibit to the highest degree all the principles applicable to a physical network (isolation, reproducibility, manageability, ...). Currently, there are no standard definitions available for network virtualization or its associated architectures. Therefore, this deliverable proposes the Virtual Network layer architecture and evaluates a set of Management- and Control Planes that can be used for the partitioning and virtualization of the FEDERICA network resources. This evaluation has been performed taking into account an initial set of FEDERICA requirements; a possible extension of the selected tools will be evaluated in future deliverables. The studies described in this deliverable define the virtual architecture of the FEDERICA infrastructure. During this activity, the need has been recognised to establish a new set of basic definitions (taxonomy) for the building blocks that compose the so-called slice, i.e. the virtual network instantiation (which is virtual with regard to the abstracted view made of the building blocks of the FEDERICA infrastructure) and its architectural plane representation. These definitions will be established as a common nomenclature for the FEDERICA project. Other important aspects when defining a new architecture are the user requirements. It is crucial that the resulting architecture fits the demands that users may have. Since this deliverable has been produced at the same time as the contact process with users, made by the project activities related to the Use Case definitions, JRA1 has proposed a set of basic Use Cases to be considered as starting point for its internal studies. When researchers want to experiment with their developments, they need not only network resources on their slices, but also a slice of the processing resources. These processing slice resources are understood as virtual machine instances that users can use to make them behave as software routers or end nodes, on which to download the software protocols or applications they have produced and want to assess in a realistic environment. Hence, this deliverable also studies the APIs of several virtual machine management software products in order to identify which best suits FEDERICA’s needs.Postprint (published version

Science 2.0 : sharing scientific data on the Grid

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaA computação assumese cada vez mais como um recurso essencial em ciência, levando ao surgimento do termo eCiência para designar a utilização de tecnologias de computação avançada para suportar a realização de experiências científicas, a preservação e partilha do conhecimento. Uma das áreas de aplicação do conceito de eCiência é o tratamento e análise de imagens médicas. Os processos que lidam com imagem médica, tanto ao nível clínico como de investigação, são exigentes em relação ao suporte computacional, devido aos algoritmos de processamento de imagem que requerem e à elevada capacidade de armazenamento relacionada com volume das imagens geradas. As políticas públicas e os avanços tecnológicos recentes orientados para a eCiência, têm vindo a apoiar o desenvolvimento da computação em Grid, tanto a nível dos middlewares como da instalação de capacidade de produção, como um sistema de computação avançado que permite a partilha de recursos, instrumentos científicos e boas práticas em comunidades virtuais. Este trabalho tem como objectivo desenvolver uma estratégia e um protótipo para o armazenamento de dados médicos na Grid, visando a sua utilização em investigação. Uma preocupação diferenciadora prendese com o objectivo de colocar as potencialidades da Grid ao serviço de utilizadores não técnicos (e.g. médicos, investigadores), que acedem a serviços de processamento e de armazenamento e catalogação de dados de forma transparente, através de um portal Web. O protótipo desenvolvido permite a investigadores na área das neurociências, sem conhecimentos específicos da tecnologia Grid, armazenar imagens e analisálas em Grids de produção existentes, baseadas no middleware gLite. ABSTRACT: Computing has become an essential tool in modern science, leading to the appearance of the term eScience to designate the usage of advanced computing technologies to support the execution of scientific experiments, and the preservation and sharing of knowledge. One of eScience domain areas is the medical imaging analysis. The processes that deal with medical images, both at clinical and investigation level, are very demanding in terms of computational support, due to the analysis algorithms that involve large volumes of generated images, requiring high storage capabilities. The recent public policies and technological advances are eScience oriented, and have been supporting the development of Grid computing, both at the middleware level and at the installation of production capabilities in an advanced computing system, that allows the sharing of resources, scientific instrumentation and good practices among virtual communities. The main objective of this work is to develop a strategy and a prototype to allow the storage of medical data on the Grid, targeting a research environment. The differentiating concern of this work is the ability to provide the nonexperts users (e.g: doctors, researchers) access to the Grid services, like storage and processing, through a friendly Web interface. The developed prototype allows researchers in the field of neuroscience, without any specific knowledge of Grid technology, to store images and analyse them in production Grid infrastructures, based on the gLite middleware

An economic market for the brokering of time and budget guarantees

Grids offer best effort services to users. Service level agreements offer the opportunity to provide guarantees upon services offered, in such a way that it captures the users’ requirements, while also considering concerns of the service providers. This is achieved via a process of converging requirements and service cost values from both sides towards an agreement. This paper presents the intelligent scheduling for quality of service market-oriented mechanism for brokering guarantees upon completion time and cost for jobs submitted to a batch-oriented compute service. Web Services agreement (negotiation) is used along with the planning of schedules in determining pricing, ensuring that jobs become prioritised depending on their budget constraints. An evaluation is performed to demonstrate how market mechanisms can be used to achieve this, whilst also showing the effects that scheduling algorithms can have upon the market in terms of rescheduling. The evaluation is completed with a comparison of the broker’s capabilities in relation to the literature

Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 1

In this document the Cat-COVITE Application for use in the CATNETS Project is introduced and motivated. Furthermore an introduction to the catallactic middleware and Web Services Agreement (WS-Agreement) concepts is given as a basis for the future work. Requirements for the application of Cat-COVITE with in catallactic systems are analysed. Finally the integration of the Cat-COVITE application and the catallactic middleware is described. --Grid Computing