Autonomic Management of Large Clusters and Their Integration into the Grid

We present a framework for the co-ordinated, autonomic management of multiple clusters in a compute center and their integration into a Grid environment. Site autonomy and the automation of administrative tasks are prime aspects in this framework. The system behavior is continuously monitored in a steering cycle and appropriate actions are taken to resolve any problems. All presented components have been implemented in the course of the EU project DataGrid: The Lemon monitoring components, the FT fault-tolerance mechanism, the quattor system for software installation and configuration, the RMS job and resource management system, and the Gridification scheme that integrates clusters into the Grid

Coordinated Autonomic Managers for Energy Efficient Date Centers

The complexity of today’s data centers has led researchers to investigate ways in which autonomic methods can be used for data center management. Autonomic managers try to monitor and manage resources to ensure that the components they manage are self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing and self-protecting (so called “self-*” properties). In this research, we consider autonomic management systems for data centers with a particular focus on making data centers more energy-aware. In particular, we consider a policy based, multi-manager autonomic management systems for energy aware data centers. Our focus is on defining the foundations – the core concepts, entities, relationships and algorithms - for autonomic management systems capable of supporting a range of management configurations. Central to our approach is the notion of a “topology” of autonomic managers that when instantiated can support a range of different configurations of autonomic managers and communication among them. The notion of “policy” is broadened to enable some autonomic managers to have more direct control over the behavior of other managers through changes in policies. The ultimate goal is to create a management framework that would allow the data center administrator to a) define managed objects, their corresponding managers, management system topology, and policies to meet their operation needs and b) rely on the management system to maintain itself automatically. A data center simulator that computes its energy consumption (computing and cooling) at any given time is implemented to evaluate the impact of different management scenarios. The management system is evaluated with different management scenarios in our simulated data center