SparkCloud: a cloud-based elastic bushfire simulation service

The accurate modeling of bushfires is not only complex and contextual but also a computationally intensive task. Ensemble predictions, involving several thousands to millions of simulations, can be required to capture and quantify the uncertain nature of bushfires. Moreover, users’ requirement and configuration may change in different situations requiring either more computational resources or modeling to be completed with a stricter time constraint. For example, during emergency situations, the user may need to make time-critical decisions that require the execution of bushfire-spread models within a deadline. Currently, most operational tools are not flexible and scalable enough to consider different users’ time requirements. In this paper, we propose the SparkCloud service, which integrates features of user-defined customizable configuration for bushfire simulations and scalability/elasticity features of the cloud to handle computation requirements. The proposed cloud service utilizes Data61’s Spark, which is a significantly flexible and scalable software system for bushfire-spread prediction and has been used in practical scenarios. The effectiveness of the SparkCloud service is demonstrated using real cases of bushfires and on real cloud computing infrastructure

Cloud Abstraction Libraries: Implementation and Comparison

Vendor lock-in makes it difficult for an organization to port their services, application or data. Cloud providers are in race to provide the best-in-class storage, networking and compute resources. Many organizations are moving towards micro-services and cloud services architecture. It is very important for an infrastructure platform to offer a high-quality cloud computing environment consistently across multiple cloud platforms. To enable this, a collaborative yet an independent cloud abstraction service is required. The cloud abstraction library should support the basic use cases of delivery pipeline, service management, cloud operations and security service. Cloud interoperability standards helps to improve availability and scalability by providing cross organizational or vendor independent projects. An important aspect of cloud interoperability is development of standardized APIs to send and receive data, irrespective of the underlying cloud implementation. Cloud interoperability helps application and data portability between public clouds and private clouds. This thesis explores the role of open source libraries to use cloud specific features. Our work is to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate Dasein cloud and jClouds against Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine. We believe that cloud standardization can be accelerated by implementations based on open source and open standards

A Platform as a Service for Concurrency-based Applications Provisioning in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming ubiquitous with sensor nodes getting more intelligent and capable of transmitting their processed data to a cloud. Concurrency-based applications play a vital role in the rise of the IoT. A concurrency-based application has multiple processes running independently and interacting with each other. An example of the concurrency-based application in IoT is wildfire management application. In a forest, various sensor devices are deployed in the different areas. The processes of the wildfire management application are running on the sensor devices of different areas independently. The process of a particular area monitors the temperature and interacts with the processes in the neighboring areas. This interaction is based on the fire contour algorithm, which allows the application to provide the real-time direction and evolution of the fire in case of the fire incident. Cloud computing is a paradigm for swiftly provisioning a shared pool of configurable resources (e.g., services, applications, network, and storage) on demand. Cloud computing can help to tackle the challenges of IoT-based applications provisioning by offering the Platform as a Service (PaaS). Therefore, developers of such concurrency-based applications can use cloud's PaaS for faster development as well as cost efficiency. However, the PaaS faces several challenges at the time of provisioning of concurrency-based application (i.e., development, deployment, and management). For the concurrency-based application development phase, PaaS should support the various API and frameworks for the development of multiple processes of the concurrency-based application, which helps to start development quickly. For the deployment of the concurrency-based application, the PaaS must offer the facility of hosting of different processes in an isolated environment and enable process's edges to allow inter-process communication. In management phase of the concurrency-based application, PaaS should be able to orchestrate the chain of processes defined during the development phase. The main intent of this dissertation is to provide a PaaS solution for concurrency-based applications provisioning in IoT to solve the challenges as mentioned above. The major contributions of the thesis are in twofold. First, we propose a PaaS architecture for concurrency-based applications provisioning in IoT. Second, we provide a proof of concept in which a prototype is built using as basis Cloud Foundry, an existing PaaS platform, and TelosB as the IoT Infrastructure devices. The performance measurements have also been made to validate the results claimed