Reputation-based Cooperation in the Clouds

The popularity of the cloud computing paradigm is opening new opportunities for collaborative computing. In this paper we tackle a fundamental problem in open-ended cloud-based distributed comput- ing platforms, i.e., the quest for potential collaborators. We assume that cloud participants are willing to share their computational resources for shared distributed computing problems, but they are not willing to dis- closure the details of their resources. Lacking such information, we advo- cate to rely on reputation scores obtained by evaluating the interactions among participants. More specifically, we propose a methodology to as- sess, at design time, the impact of different (reputation-based) collabo- rator selection strategies on the system performance. The evaluation is performed through statistical analysis on a volunteer cloud simulator

DEPAS: A Decentralized Probabilistic Algorithm for Auto-Scaling

The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers' solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our simulations, which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.Comment: Submitted to Springer Computin

Coordinated Self-Adaptation in Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Overlays

Self-adaptive systems typically rely on a closed control loop which detects when the current behavior deviates too much from the optimal one, determines new optimal values for system parameters, and applies changes to the system configuration. In decentralized systems, implementing each of these steps is challenging, especially when nodes need to coordinate their local configurations. In this paper, we propose a decentralized method to automatically tune global system parameters in a coordinated manner. We use gossip-based protocols to continuously monitor system properties and to disseminate parameter updates. We show that this method applied to a decentralized resource selection service allows the system to quickly adapt to changes in workload types and node properties, and only incurs a negligible communication overhead

DECENTRALIZED RESOURCE ORCHESTRATION FOR HETEROGENEOUS GRIDS

Modern desktop machines now use multi-core CPUs to enable improved performance. However, achieving high performance on multi-core machines without optimized software support is still difficult even in a single machine, because contention for shared resources can make it hard to exploit multiple computing resources efficiently. Moreover, more diverse and heterogeneous hardware platforms (e.g. general-purpose GPU and Cell processors) have emerged and begun to impact grid computing. Given that heterogeneity and diversity are now a major trend going forward, grid computing must support these environmental changes. In this dissertation, I design and evaluate a decentralized resource management scheme to exploit heterogeneous multiple computing resources effectively. I suggest resource management algorithms that can efficiently utilize a diverse computational environment, including multiple symmetric computing entities and heterogeneous multi-computing entities, and achieve good load-balancing and high total system throughput. Moreover, I propose expressive resource description techniques to accommodate more heterogeneous environments, allowing incoming jobs with complex requirements to be matched to available resources. First, I develop decentralized resource management frameworks and job scheduling schemes to exploit multi-core nodes in peer-to-peer grids. I present two new load-balancing schemes that explicitly account for resource sharing and contention across multiple cores within a single machine, and propose a simple performance prediction model that can represent a continuum of resource sharing among cores of a CPU. Second, I provide scalable resource discovery and load balancing techniques to accommodate nodes with many types of computing elements, such as multi-core CPUs and GPUs, in a peer-to-peer grid architecture. My scheme takes into account diverse aspects of heterogeneous nodes to maximize overall system throughput as well as minimize messaging costs without sacrificing the failure resilience provided by an underlying peer-to-peer overlay network. Finally, I propose an expressive resource discovery method to support multi-attribute, range-based job constraints. The common approach of using simple attribute indexes does not suffice, as range-based constraints may be satisfied by more than a single value. I design a compact ID-based representation for resource characteristics, and integrate this representation into the decentralized resource discovery framework. By extensive experimental results via simulation, I show that my schemes can match heterogeneous jobs to heterogeneous resources both effectively (good matches are found, load is balanced), and efficiently (the new functionality imposes little overhead)

A Holistic Approach for Collaborative Workload Execution in Volunteer Clouds

The demand for provisioning, using, and maintaining distributed computational resources is growing hand in hand with the quest for ubiquitous services. Centralized infrastructures such as cloud computing systems provide suitable solutions for many applications, but their scalability could be limited in some scenarios, such as in the case of latency-dependent applications. The volunteer cloud paradigm aims at overcoming this limitation by encouraging clients to offer their own spare, perhaps unused, computational resources. Volunteer clouds are thus complex, large-scale, dynamic systems that demand for self-adaptive capabilities to offer effective services, as well as modeling and analysis techniques to predict their behavior. In this article, we propose a novel holistic approach for volunteer clouds supporting collaborative task execution services able to improve the quality of service of compute-intensive workloads. We instantiate our approach by extending a recently proposed ant colony optimization algorithm for distributed task execution with a workload-based partitioning of the overlay network of the volunteer cloud. Finally, we evaluate our approach using simulation-based statistical analysis techniques on a workload benchmark provided by Google. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms some traditional distributed task scheduling algorithms in the presence of compute-intensive workloads

Solving key design issues for massively multiplayer online games on peer-to-peer architectures

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale on the Internet and are predominantly implemented by Client/Server architectures. While such a classical approach to distributed system design offers many benefits, it suffers from significant technical and commercial drawbacks, primarily reliability and scalability costs. This realisation has sparked recent research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This thesis identifies six key design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely interest management, event dissemination, task sharing, state persistency, cheating mitigation, and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. How well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria is also evaluated. It is argued that although P2P MMOG architectures are developing rapidly, their support for task sharing and incentive mechanisms still need to be improved. The design of a novel framework for P2P MMOGs, Mediator, is presented. It employs a self-organising super-peer network over a P2P overlay infrastructure, and addresses the six design issues in an integrated system. The Mediator framework is extensible, as it supports flexible policy plug-ins and can accommodate the introduction of new superpeer roles. Key components of this framework have been implemented and evaluated with a simulated P2P MMOG. As the Mediator framework relies on super-peers for computational and administrative tasks, membership management is crucial, e.g. to allow the system to recover from super-peer failures. A new technology for this, namely Membership-Aware Multicast with Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), has been designed, implemented and evaluated. It reuses the communication structure of a tree-based application-level multicast to track group membership efficiently. Evaluation of a demonstration application shows i that MAMBO is able to quickly detect and handle peers joining and leaving. Compared to a conventional supervision architecture, MAMBO is more scalable, and yet incurs less communication overheads. Besides MMOGs, MAMBO is suitable for other P2P applications, such as collaborative computing and multimedia streaming. This thesis also presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel task mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous P2P environments, Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDA). DDA is primarily designed to support NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs, and specifically in the Mediator framework. However, it can also support the sharing of computational and interactive tasks with various deadlines in general P2P applications. Experimental and analytical results demonstrate that DDA efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers of real-time NPC tasks in a simulated P2P MMOG with approximately 1000 players. Furthermore, DDA supports gaming interactivity by keeping the communication latency among NPC hosts and ordinary players low. It also supports flexible matchmaking policies, and can motivate application participants to contribute resources to the system

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges

The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi, Indi