1,319 research outputs found
Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements
As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems,
management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and
integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer
services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective
management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that
constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper
identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents
innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on
Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the
benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape
Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud
With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react
rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual
applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete
business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes,
i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite
the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions
supporting them.
In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process
Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an
architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss
existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized
coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we
present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which
are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify
open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of
elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and
P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and
Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems,
Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00
A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing
Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that
need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections
distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with
high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In
this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with
other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery
networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide
comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data
transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling.
Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to
validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration.
Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better
understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their
applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap
analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new
issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and
mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand
this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor
Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions
The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last
decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space,
but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider
data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing
cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple
providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers.
These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing
architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These
architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and
devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems.
Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for
realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201
Scanflow-K8s: agent-based framework for autonomic management and supervision of ML workflows in Kubernetes clusters
Machine Learning (ML) projects are currently heavily based on workflows composed of some reproducible steps and executed as containerized pipelines to build or deploy ML models efficiently because of the flexibility, portability, and fast delivery they provide to the ML life-cycle. However, deployed models need to be watched and constantly managed, supervised, and debugged to guarantee their availability, validity, and robustness in unexpected situations. Therefore, containerized ML workflows would benefit from leveraging flexible and diverse autonomic capabilities. This work presents an architecture for autonomic ML workflows with abilities for multi-layered control, based on an agent-based approach that enables autonomic management and supervision of ML workflows at the application layer and the infrastructure layer (by collaborating with the orchestrator). We redesign the Scanflow ML framework to support such multi-agent approach by using triggers, primitives, and strategies. We also implement a practical platform, so-called Scanflow-K8s, that enables autonomic ML workflows on Kubernetes clusters based on the Scanflow agents. MNIST image classification and MLPerf ImageNet classification benchmarks are used as case studies to show the capabilities of Scanflow-K8s under different scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed agent approach and the Scanflow-K8s platform for the autonomic management of ML workflows in Kubernetes clusters at multiple layers.This work was supported by Lenovo as part of Lenovo-BSC 2020 collaboration agreement, by the Spanish Government under contract PID2019-107255GB-C22, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2017-SGR-1414 and under grant 2020 FI-B 00257.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Planning with Global Constraints for Computing Infrastructure Reconfiguration
This paper presents a prototype system called SFplan- ner which uses an automated planning technique to generate workflows for reconfiguring a computing infras- tructure. The system allows an administrator to specify a configuration task which consists of current state, de- sired state and global constraints. This task is compiled to a grounded finite-domain representation as the input for the standard (unmodified) Fast-Downward planner in order to automatically generate a workflow. The ex- ecution of the workflow will bring the system into the desired state, preserving the global constraints at every stage of the workflow
High-Performance Cloud Computing: A View of Scientific Applications
Scientific computing often requires the availability of a massive number of
computers for performing large scale experiments. Traditionally, these needs
have been addressed by using high-performance computing solutions and installed
facilities such as clusters and super computers, which are difficult to setup,
maintain, and operate. Cloud computing provides scientists with a completely
new model of utilizing the computing infrastructure. Compute resources, storage
resources, as well as applications, can be dynamically provisioned (and
integrated within the existing infrastructure) on a pay per use basis. These
resources can be released when they are no more needed. Such services are often
offered within the context of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which ensure the
desired Quality of Service (QoS). Aneka, an enterprise Cloud computing
solution, harnesses the power of compute resources by relying on private and
public Clouds and delivers to users the desired QoS. Its flexible and service
based infrastructure supports multiple programming paradigms that make Aneka
address a variety of different scenarios: from finance applications to
computational science. As examples of scientific computing in the Cloud, we
present a preliminary case study on using Aneka for the classification of gene
expression data and the execution of fMRI brain imaging workflow.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, conference pape
An Approach to Ad hoc Cloud Computing
We consider how underused computing resources within an enterprise may be
harnessed to improve utilization and create an elastic computing
infrastructure. Most current cloud provision involves a data center model, in
which clusters of machines are dedicated to running cloud infrastructure
software. We propose an additional model, the ad hoc cloud, in which
infrastructure software is distributed over resources harvested from machines
already in existence within an enterprise. In contrast to the data center cloud
model, resource levels are not established a priori, nor are resources
dedicated exclusively to the cloud while in use. A participating machine is not
dedicated to the cloud, but has some other primary purpose such as running
interactive processes for a particular user. We outline the major
implementation challenges and one approach to tackling them
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