ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies

A scalable application server on Beowulf clusters : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Information Science at Albany, Auckland, Massey University, New Zealand

Application performance and scalability of a large distributed multi-tiered application is a core requirement for most of today's critical business applications. I have investigated the scalability of a J2EE application server using the standard ECperf benchmark application in the Massey Beowulf Clusters namely the Sisters and the Helix. My testing environment consists of Open Source software: The integrated JBoss-Tomcat as the application server and the web server, along with PostgreSQL as the database. My testing programs were run on the clustered application server, which provide replication of the Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) objects. I have completed various centralized and distributed tests using the JBoss Cluster. I concluded that clustering of the application server and web server will effectively increase the performance of the application running on them given sufficient system resources. The application performance will scale to a point where a bottleneck has occurred in the testing system, the bottleneck could be any resources included in the testing environment: the hardware, software, network and the application that is running. Performance tuning for a large-scale J2EE application is a complicated issue, which is related to the resources available. However, by carefully identifying the performance bottleneck in the system with hardware, software, network, operating system and application configuration. I can improve the performance of the J2EE applications running in a Beowulf Cluster. The software bottleneck can be solved by changing the default settings, on the other hand, hardware bottlenecks are harder unless more investment are made to purchase higher speed and capacity hardware

Software assembly and open standards for driving simulation

International audienceDriving simulation systems involve a combination of different computation codes. Although some of these modules are application-specific, their majority is reusable and state-of-the-art implementations are readily available in the open source community. This study investigates whether these open source libraries can combine to build a driving simulation application with reasonable performance. To this end, a component-oriented architecture is proposed, in which modules encapsulate relevant libraries behind a standard interface and exchange simulation data through a message passing interface. By integrating a render engine, a physics library and a simple vehicle dynamics model, we were able to rapidly build a functional minimal simulation application supporting distributed execution over a cluster of computers. As this architecture allows the transparent modification of module code and simplifies the addition of new modules, this kernel represents the foundations of an extensible and reconfigurable open source system dedicated to driving simulation. Details on this kernel application and ongoing development of this platform can found at http://open-s.sourceforge.net.Les logiciels de simulation de conduite reposent sur une combinaison de différents codes de calculs. Bien qu’une partie de ces modules soit extrêmement dépendante d’un usage particulier, leur majorité est réutilisable et certaines implémentations de pointe sont disponibles dans la communauté du logiciel libre. Cette étude vise à déterminer s’il est possible de combiner ces bibliothèques libres afin de construire une application de simulation de conduite atteignant de raisonnables performances. A cette fin, nous proposons une architecture orientée composant, selon laquelle ces bibliothèques sont encapsulées dans des modules s’échangeant des données relatives à la simulation au travers d’une interface d’échange de messages. En intégrant à cette architecture un moteur graphique, une bibliothèque de simulation de physique et un simple modèle de dynamique de véhicule, nous avons pu rapidement mettre en place une application de simulation minimale, pouvant s’exécuter de manière distribuée sur un cluster d’ordinateurs. Cette architecture permettant de modifier le code d’un module de manière transparente et simplifiant l’ajout de nouveaux modules, ce noyau constitue la base d’un logiciel libre extensible et polymorphique dédié à la simulation de conduite dont les détails peuvent être consultés sur le site : http://open-s.sourceforge.net

Software assembly and open standards for driving simulation

Driving simulation systems involve a combination of different computation codes. Although some of these modules are application-specific, their majority is reusable and state-of-the-art implementations are readily available in the open source community. This study investigates whether these open source libraries can combine to build a driving simulation application with reasonable performance. To this end, a component-oriented architecture is proposed, in which modules encapsulate relevant libraries behind a standard interface and exchange simulation data through a message passing interface. By integrating a render engine, a physics library and a simple vehicle dynamics model, we were able to rapidly build a functional minimal simulation application supporting distributed execution over a cluster of computers. As this architecture allows the transparent modification of module code and simplifies the addition of new modules, this kernel represents the foundations of an extensible and reconfigurable open source system dedicated to driving simulation. Details on this kernel application and ongoing development of this platform can found at http://open-s.sourceforge.net.Les logiciels de simulation de conduite reposent sur une combinaison de différents codes de calculs. Bien qu’une partie de ces modules soit extrêmement dépendante d’un usage particulier, leur majorité est réutilisable et certaines implémentations de pointe sont disponibles dans la communauté du logiciel libre. Cette étude vise à déterminer s’il est possible de combiner ces bibliothèques libres afin de construire une application de simulation de conduite atteignant de raisonnables performances. A cette fin, nous proposons une architecture orientée composant, selon laquelle ces bibliothèques sont encapsulées dans des modules s’échangeant des données relatives à la simulation au travers d’une interface d’échange de messages. En intégrant à cette architecture un moteur graphique, une bibliothèque de simulation de physique et un simple modèle de dynamique de véhicule, nous avons pu rapidement mettre en place une application de simulation minimale, pouvant s’exécuter de manière distribuée sur un cluster d’ordinateurs. Cette architecture permettant de modifier le code d’un module de manière transparente et simplifiant l’ajout de nouveaux modules, ce noyau constitue la base d’un logiciel libre extensible et polymorphique dédié à la simulation de conduite dont les détails peuvent être consultés sur le site : http://open-s.sourceforge.net

RELEASE: A High-level Paradigm for Reliable Large-scale Server Software

Erlang is a functional language with a much-emulated model for building reliable distributed systems. This paper outlines the RELEASE project, and describes the progress in the rst six months. The project aim is to scale the Erlang's radical concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively parallel machines. Currently Erlang has inherently scalable computation and reliability models, but in practice scalability is constrained by aspects of the language and virtual machine. We are working at three levels to address these challenges: evolving the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively on large scale multicore systems; evolving the language to Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang; developing a scalable Erlang infrastructure to integrate multiple, heterogeneous clusters. We are also developing state of the art tools that allow programmers to understand the behaviour of massively parallel SD Erlang programs. We will demonstrate the e ectiveness of the RELEASE approach using demonstrators and two large case studies on a Blue Gene

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