Dynamic on Demand Virtual Clusters in Grid

In Grid environments, many different resources are intended to work in a coordinated manner, each resource having its own features and complexity. As the number of resources grows, simplifying automation and management is among the most important issues to address. This paper's contribution lies on the extension and implementation of a grid metascheduler that dynamically discovers, creates and manages on-demand virtual clusters. The first module selects the clusters using graph heuristics. The algorithm then tries to find a solution by searching a set of clusters, mapped to the graph, that achieve the best performance for a given task. The second module, one per-grid node, monitors and manages physical and virtual machines. When a new task arrives, these modules modify virtual machine's configuration or use live migration to dynamically adapt resource distribution at the clusters, obtaining maximum utilization. Metascheduler components and local administrator modules work together to make decisions at run time to balance and optimize system throughput. This implementation results in performance improvement of 20% on the total computing time, with machines and clusters processing 100% of their working time. These results allow us to conclude that this solution is feasible to be implemented on Grid environments, where automation and self-management are key to attain effective resource usage.Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS, vol. 5415)Instituto de Investigación en Informátic

Secure Integration of Desktop Grids and Compute Clusters Based on Virtualization and Meta-Scheduling

Reducing the cost for business or scientific computations, is a commonly expressed goal in today’s companies. Using the available computers of local employees or the outsourcing of such computations are two obvious solutions to save money for additional hardware. Both possibilities exhibit security related disadvantages, since the deployed software and data can be copied or tampered if appropriate countermeasures are not taken. In this paper, an approach is presented to let a local desktop machines and remote cluster resources be securely combined into a singel Grid environment. Solutions to several problems in the areas of secure virtual networks, meta-scheduling and accessing cluster schedulers from desktop Grids are proposed

Target Tracking Based on Virtual Grid in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important and typical application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is target tracking. Although target tracking, can provide benefits for large-scale WSNs and organize them into clusters but tracking a moving target in cluster-based WSNs suffers a boundary problem. The main goal of this paper was to introduce an efficient and novel mobility management protocol namely Target Tracking Based on Virtual Grid (TTBVG), which integrates on-demand dynamic clustering into a cluster- based WSN for target tracking. This protocol converts on-demand dynamic clusters to scalable cluster-based WSNs, by using boundary nodes and facilitates sensors’ collaboration around clusters. In this manner, each sensor node has the probability of becoming a cluster head and apperceives the tradeoff between energy consumption and local sensor collaboration in cluster-based sensor networks. The simulation results of this study demonstrated that the efficiency of the proposed protocol in both one-hop and multi-hop cluster-based sensor networks

Examining trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of urban form

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

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

HIL: designing an exokernel for the data center

We propose a new Exokernel-like layer to allow mutually untrusting physically deployed services to efficiently share the resources of a data center. We believe that such a layer offers not only efficiency gains, but may also enable new economic models, new applications, and new security-sensitive uses. A prototype (currently in active use) demonstrates that the proposed layer is viable, and can support a variety of existing provisioning tools and use cases.Partial support for this work was provided by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, National Science Foundation awards 1347525 and 1149232 as well as the several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or