An architecture and execution environment for component integration rules

The Integration Rules (IRules) project at Arizona State University (http://www.eas.asu.edu/~irules) is developing a declarative event-based approach to component integration. Integration rules are based on the concept of active database rules, providing an active approach for specifying event- driven activity in a distributed environment. The IRules project consists of a knowledge model that specifies the IRules Definition Language and an execution model that supports integration rule execution. This research focuses on the execution model and the architectural design parts of the IRules project. The main objective of this research is to develop a distributed execution environment for using integration rules in the integration of black-box components. In particular, this research will investigate the design of an architecture that supports the IRules semantic framework, the development of an execution model for rule and transaction processing, and the design of a rule processing algorithm for coordinating the execution of integration rules. This research will combine the distributed computing framework of Jini, the asynchronous event notification mechanism of the Java Message Service (JMS), and the distributed blocking access functionality of JavaSpaces to support active rule processing in a distributed environment. The limitations of the underlying Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) component model pose transaction processing challenges for the integration process. This research will develop a suitable transaction model and processing logic to overcome the limitations of the underlying EJB component model. Furthermore, the architectural design will allow an easy extension of the system to accommodate other component models. This research is expected to contribute to nested rule and transaction processing for active rules that have not been previously addressed in distributed rule processing environments. The development of the IRules execution environment will also contribute to the use of distributed rule- based techniques for eventdriven component integration

Support for flexible and transparent distributed computing

Modern distributed computing developed from the traditional supercomputing community rooted firmly in the culture of batch management. Therefore, the field has been dominated by queuing-based resource managers and work flow based job submission environments where static resource demands needed be determined and reserved prior to launching executions. This has made it difficult to support resource environments (e.g. Grid, Cloud) where the available resources as well as the resource requirements of applications may be both dynamic and unpredictable. This thesis introduces a flexible execution model where the compute capacity can be adapted to fit the needs of applications as they change during execution. Resource provision in this model is based on a fine-grained, self-service approach instead of the traditional one-time, system-level model. The thesis introduces a middleware based Application Agent (AA) that provides a platform for the applications to dynamically interact and negotiate resources with the underlying resource infrastructure. We also consider the issue of transparency, i.e., hiding the provision and management of the distributed environment. This is the key to attracting public to use the technology. The AA not only replaces user-controlled process of preparing and executing an application with a transparent software-controlled process, it also hides the complexity of selecting right resources to ensure execution QoS. This service is provided by an On-line Feedback-based Automatic Resource Configuration (OAC) mechanism cooperating with the flexible execution model. The AA constantly monitors utility-based feedbacks from the application during execution and thus is able to learn its behaviour and resource characteristics. This allows it to automatically compose the most efficient execution environment on the fly and satisfy any execution requirements defined by users. Two policies are introduced to supervise the information learning and resource tuning in the OAC. The Utility Classification policy classifies hosts according to their historical performance contributions to the application. According to this classification, the AA chooses high utility hosts and withdraws low utility hosts to configure an optimum environment. The Desired Processing Power Estimation (DPPE) policy dynamically configures the execution environment according to the estimated desired total processing power needed to satisfy users’ execution requirements. Through the introducing of flexibility and transparency, a user is able to run a dynamic/normal distributed application anywhere with optimised execution performance, without managing distributed resources. Based on the standalone model, the thesis further introduces a federated resource negotiation framework as a step forward towards an autonomous multi-user distributed computing world

Cohort-based kernel principal component analysis with Multi-path Service Routing in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning (ML) strategy that is performed in a decentralized environment. The training is performed locally by the client on the global model shared by the server. Federated learning has recently been used as a service (FLaaS) to provide a collaborative training environment to independent third-party applications. However, the widespread adoption in distributed settings of FL has opened venues for a number of security attacks. A number of studies have been performed to prevent multiple FL attacks. However, sophisticated attacks, such as label-flipping attacks, have received little or no attention. From the said perspective, this research is focused on providing a defense mechanism for the aforesaid attack. The proposed approach is based on Type-based Cohorts (TC) with Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) to detect and defend against label-flipping attacks. Moreover, to improve the performance of the network, we will deploy Multi-path Service Routing (MSR) for edge nodes to work effectively. The KPCA will be used to secure the network from attacks. The proposed mechanism will provide an effective and secure FL system. The proposed approach is evaluated with respect to the following measures: execution time, memory consumption, information loss, accuracy, service request violations, and the request’s waiting time

Coordinating Resource Use in Open Distributed Systems

In an open distributed system, computational resources are peer-owned, and distributed over time and space. The system is open to interactions with its environment, and the resources can dynamically join or leave the system, or can be discovered at runtime. This dynamicity leads to opportunities to carry out computations without statically owned resources, harnessing the collective compute power of the resources connected by the Internet. However, realizing this potential requires efficient and scalable resource discovery, coordination, and control, which present challenges in a dynamic, open environment. In this thesis, I present an approach to address these challenges by separating the functionality concerns of concurrent computations from those of coordinating their resource use, with the purpose of reducing programming complexity, and aiding development of correct, efficient, and resource-aware concurrent programs. As a first step towards effectively coordinating distributed resources, I developed DREAM, a Distributed Resource Estimation and Allocation Model, which enables computations to reason about future availability of resources. I then developed a fine-grained resource coordination scheme for distributed computations. The coordination scheme integrates DREAM-based resource reasoning into a distributed scheduler, for deciding and enforcing fine-grained resource-use schedules for distributed computations. To control the overhead caused by the coordination, a tuner is implemented which explicitly balances the overhead of the control mechanisms against the extent of control exercised. The effectiveness and performance of the resource coordination approach have been evaluated using a number of case studies. Experimental results show that the approach can effectively schedule computations for supporting various types of coordination objectives, such as ensuring Quality-of-Service, power-efficient execution, and dynamic load balancing. The overhead caused by the coordination mechanism is relatively modest, and adjustable through the tuner. In addition, the coordination mechanism does not add extra programming complexity to computations

A Change Execution System for Enterprise Services with Compensation Support

Modern enterprises rely on a distributed IT infrastructure to execute their business processes, adopting Service Oriented Architectures in order to improve the flexibility and ease of adaptation of their functions. Nowadays this is a vital characteristic, as the increased competition forces companies to continuously evolve and adapt. SOA applications must be supported by management and deployment systems, which have to continuously apply modifications to the distributed infrastructure. This article presents a modelbased solution for automatically applying change plans to heterogeneous enterprise managed environments. The proposed solution uses models which describe in an abstract language the changes that need to be applied to the environment, and executes all the required operations to the specific managed elements. Also, to ensure that the environment ends in a stable state, compensation for previously executed operations is supported. The validation results from a case study taken from the banking domain are also presented here

DIAMOnDS - DIstributed Agents for MObile & Dynamic Services

Distributed Services Architecture with support for mobile agents between services, offer significantly improved communication and computational flexibility. The uses of agents allow execution of complex operations that involve large amounts of data to be processed effectively using distributed resources. The prototype system Distributed Agents for Mobile and Dynamic Services (DIAMOnDS), allows a service to send agents on its behalf, to other services, to perform data manipulation and processing. Agents have been implemented as mobile services that are discovered using the Jini Lookup mechanism and used by other services for task management and communication. Agents provide proxies for interaction with other services as well as specific GUI to monitor and control the agent activity. Thus agents acting on behalf of one service cooperate with other services to carry out a job, providing inter-operation of loosely coupled services in a semi-autonomous way. Remote file system access functionality has been incorporated by the agent framework and allows services to dynamically share and browse the file system resources of hosts, running the services. Generic database access functionality has been implemented in the mobile agent framework that allows performing complex data mining and processing operations efficiently in distributed system. A basic data searching agent is also implemented that performs a query based search in a file system. The testing of the framework was carried out on WAN by moving Connectivity Test agents between AgentStations in CERN, Switzerland and NUST, Pakistan.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, CHEP03, La Jolla, California, March 24-28, 200

A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks

Process Management in Distributed Operating Systems

As part of designing and building the Amoeba distributed operating system, we have come up with a simple set of mechanisms for process management that allows downloading process migration, checkpointing, remote debugging and emulation of alien operating system interfaces.\ud The basic process management facilities are realized by the Amoeba Kernel and can be augmented by user-space services: Debug Service, Load-Balancing Service, Unix-Emulation Service, Checkpoint Service, etc.\ud The Amoeba Kernel can produce a representation of the state of a process which can be given to another Kernel where it is accepted for continued execution. This state consists of the memory contents in the form of a collection of segments, and a Process Descriptor which contains the additional state, program counters, stack pointers, system call state, etc.\ud Careful separation of mechanism and policy has resulted in a compact set of Kernel operations for process creation and management. A collection of user-space services provides process management policies and a simple interface for application programs.\ud In this paper we shall describe the mechanisms as they are being implemented in the Amoeba Distributed System at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. We believe that the mechanisms described here can also apply to other distributed systems

Job Monitoring in an Interactive Grid Analysis Environment

The grid is emerging as a great computational resource but its dynamic behavior makes the Grid environment unpredictable. Systems and networks can fail, and the introduction of more users can result in resource starvation. Once a job has been submitted for execution on the grid, monitoring becomes essential for a user to see that the job is completed in an efficient way, and to detect any problems that occur while the job is running. In current environments once a user submits a job he loses direct control over the job and the system behaves like a batch system: the user submits the job and later gets a result back. The only information a user can obtain about a job is whether it is scheduled, running, cancelled or finished. Today users are becoming increasingly interested in such analysis grid environments in which they can check the progress of the job, obtain intermediate results, terminate the job based on the progress of job or intermediate results, steer the job to other nodes to achieve better performance and check the resources consumed by the job. In order to fulfill their requirements of interactivity a mechanism is needed that can provide the user with real time access to information about different attributes of a job. In this paper we present the design of a Job Monitoring Service, a web service that will provide interactive remote job monitoring by allowing users to access different attributes of a job once it has been submitted to the interactive Grid Analysis Environment