Development of HU Cloud-based Spark Applications for Streaming Data Analytics

Nowadays, streaming data overflows from various sources and technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), making conventional data analytics methods unsuitable to manage the latency of data processing relative to the growing demand for high processing speed and algorithmically scalability [1]. Real-time streaming data analytics, which processes data while it is in motion, is required to allow many organizations to analyze streaming data effectively and efficiently for being more active in their strategies. To analyze real time “Big” streaming data, parallel and distributed computing over a cloud of computers has become a mainstream solution to allow scalability, resiliency to failure, and fast processing of massive data sets. Several open source data analytics frameworks have been proposed and developed for streaming data analytics successfully. Apache Spark is one such framework being developed at the University of California, Berkley and gains lots of attentions due to reducing IO by storing data in a memory and a unique data executing model. In Computer & Information Sciences (CISC) at Harrisburg University (HU), we have been working on building a private Cloud Computing for future research and planning to involve industry collaboration where high volumes of real time streaming data are used to develop solutions to practical problems in industry. By developing a HU Cloud based environment for Apache Spark applications for streaming data analytics with batch processing on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), we can prepare future big data era that can turn big data into beneficial actions for industry needs. This research aims to develop Spark applications supporting an entire streaming data analytics workflow, which consists of data ingestion, data analytics, data visualization and data storing. In particular, we will focus on a real time stock recommender system based on state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML)/Deep Learning (DL) frameworks such as mllib, TensorFlow, Apache mxnet and pytorch. The plan is to gather real time stock market data from Google/Yahoo finance data streams to build a model to predict a future stock market trend. The proposed Spark applications on the HU cloud-based architecture will give emphasis to finding time-series forcating module for a specific period, typically based on selected attributes. In addition, we will test scale-out architecture, efficient parallel processing and fault tolerance of Spark applications on the HU Cloud based HDFS. We believe that this research will bring the CISC program at HU significant competitive advantages globally

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio

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

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201