Dependable Distributed Computing for the International Telecommunication Union Regional Radio Conference RRC06

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Regional Radio Conference (RRC06) established in 2006 a new frequency plan for the introduction of digital broadcasting in European, African, Arab, CIS countries and Iran. The preparation of the plan involved complex calculations under short deadline and required dependable and efficient computing capability. The ITU designed and deployed in-situ a dedicated PC farm, in parallel to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) which provided and supported a system based on the EGEE Grid. The planning cycle at the RRC06 required a periodic execution in the order of 200,000 short jobs, using several hundreds of CPU hours, in a period of less than 12 hours. The nature of the problem required dynamic workload-balancing and low-latency access to the computing resources. We present the strategy and key technical choices that delivered a reliable service to the RRC06

Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 2

This document first gives an introduction to Application Layer Networks and subsequently presents the catallactic resource allocation model and its integration into the middleware architecture of the developed prototype. Furthermore use cases for employed service models in such scenarios are presented as general application scenarios as well as two very detailed cases: Query services and Data Mining services. This work concludes by describing the middleware implementation and evaluation as well as future work in this area. --Grid Computing

Preliminary specification and design documentation for software components to achieve catallaxy in computational systems

This Report is about the preliminary specifications and design documentation for software components to achieve Catallaxy in computational systems. -- Die Arbeit beschreibt die Spezifikation und das Design von Softwarekomponenten, um das Konzept der Katallaxie in Grid Systemen umzusetzen. Eine Einführung ordnet das Konzept der Katallaxie in bestehende Grid Taxonomien ein und stellt grundlegende Komponenten vor. Anschließend werden diese Komponenten auf ihre Anwendbarkeit in bestehenden Application Layer Netzwerken untersucht.Grid Computing

Analysis of simulation environment

In this paper the requirements for an ALN simulation environment are analysed, as needed in the CATNETS Project. A number of grid and general purpose simulators are evaluated regarding the identified requirements for simulating economical resource allocation mechanisms in ALNs. Subsequently a suitable simulator is chosen for usage in the CATNETS project. --CATNETS simulator,requirements analysis,simulator selection

Trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments

In the Internet-age, the geographical boundaries that have previously impinged upon inter-organisational collaborations have become decreasingly important. Of more importance for such collaborations is the notion and subsequent nature of trust - this is especially so in Grid-like environments where resources are both made available and subsequently accessed and used by remote users from a multitude of institutions with a variety of different privileges spanning across the collaborating resources. In this context, the ability to dynamically negotiate and subsequently enforce security policies driven by various levels of inter-organisational trust is essential. In this paper we present a dynamic trust negotiation (DTN) model and associated prototype implementation showing the benefits and limitations DTN incurs in supporting n-tier delegation hops needed for trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments

HOMEBOTS: Intelligent Decentralized Services for Energy Management

The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the namewe have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a `society' of interactive household, industrial and utility equipment. They act as independent intelligent agents that communicate and negotiate in a computational market economy. The knowledge and competence aspects of this application are discussed, using an improved \ud version of task analysis according to the COMMONKADS knowledge methodology. Illustrated by simulation results, we indicate how customer knowledge can be mobilized to achieve joint goals of cost and energy savings. General implications for knowledge creation and its management are discussed

End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure

Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service

Performance Evaluation - Annual Report Year 3

This report describes the work done and results obtained in third year of the CATNETS project. Experiments carried out with the different configurations of the prototype are reported and simulation results are evaluated with the CATNETS metrics framework. The applicability of the Catallactic approach as market model for service and resource allocation in application layer networks is assessed based on the results and experience gained both from the prototype development and simulations. --Grid Computing