Checkpointing as a Service in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments

A non-invasive, cloud-agnostic approach is demonstrated for extending existing cloud platforms to include checkpoint-restart capability. Most cloud platforms currently rely on each application to provide its own fault tolerance. A uniform mechanism within the cloud itself serves two purposes: (a) direct support for long-running jobs, which would otherwise require a custom fault-tolerant mechanism for each application; and (b) the administrative capability to manage an over-subscribed cloud by temporarily swapping out jobs when higher priority jobs arrive. An advantage of this uniform approach is that it also supports parallel and distributed computations, over both TCP and InfiniBand, thus allowing traditional HPC applications to take advantage of an existing cloud infrastructure. Additionally, an integrated health-monitoring mechanism detects when long-running jobs either fail or incur exceptionally low performance, perhaps due to resource starvation, and proactively suspends the job. The cloud-agnostic feature is demonstrated by applying the implementation to two very different cloud platforms: Snooze and OpenStack. The use of a cloud-agnostic architecture also enables, for the first time, migration of applications from one cloud platform to another.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, appears in CCGrid, 201

09191 Abstracts Collection -- Fault Tolerance in High-Performance Computing and Grids

From June 4--8, 2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09191 ``Fault Tolerance in High-Performance Computing and Grids \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available. Slides of the talks and abstracts are available online at url{http://www.dagstuhl.de/Materials/index.en.phtml?09191}

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

Adaptation, deployment and evaluation of a railway simulator in cloud environments

Many scientific areas make extensive use of computer simulations to study realworld processes. As they become more complex and resource-intensive, traditional programming paradigms running on supercomputers have shown to be limited by their hardware resources. The Cloud and its elastic nature has been increasingly seen as a valid alternative for simulation execution, as it aims to provide virtually infinite resources, thus unlimited scalability. In order to bene t from this, simulators must be adapted to this paradigm since cloud migration tends to add virtualization and communication overhead. This work has the main objective of migrating a power consumption railway simulator to the Cloud, with minimal impact in the original code and preserving performance. We propose a data-centric adaptation based in MapReduce to distribute the simulation load across several nodes while minimising data transmission. We deployed our solution on an Amazon EC2 virtual cluster and measured its performance. We did the same in in our local cluster to compare the solution's performance against the original application when the Cloud's overhead is not present. Our tests show that the resulting application is highly scalable and shows a better overall performance regarding the original simulator in both environments. This document summarises the author's work during the whole adaptation development process .Ingeniería Informátic

HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

A cloudification methodology for multidimensional analysis: Implementation and application to a railway power simulator

Many scientific areas make extensive use of computer simulations to study complex real-world processes. These computations are typically very resource-intensive and present scalability issues as experiments get larger even in dedicated clusters, since these are limited by their own hardware resources. Cloud computing raises as an option to move forward into the ideal unlimited scalability by providing virtually infinite resources, yet applications must be adapted to this new paradigm. This process of converting and/or migrating an application and its data in order to make use of cloud computing is sometimes known as cloudifying the application. We propose a generalist cloudification method based in the MapReduce paradigm to migrate scientific simulations into the cloud to provide greater scalability. We analysed its viability by applying it to a real-world railway power consumption simulatior and running the resulting implementation on Hadoop YARN over Amazon EC2. Our tests show that the cloudified application is highly scalable and there is still a large margin to improve the theoretical model and its implementations, and also to extend it to a wider range of simulations. We also propose and evaluate a multidimensional analysis tool based on the cloudified application. It generates, executes and evaluates several experiments in parallel, for the same simulation kernel. The results we obtained indicate that out methodology is suitable for resource intensive simulations and multidimensional analysis, as it improves infrastructure’s utilization, efficiency and scalability when running many complex experiments.This work has been partially funded under the grant TIN2013-41350-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness, and the COST Action IC1305 "Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Platforms" (NESUS)