Dynamic service selection in workflows using performance data

An approach to dynamic workflow management and optimisation using near-realtime performance data is presented. Strategies are discussed for choosing an optimal service (based on user-specified criteria) from several semantically equivalent Web services. Such an approach may involve finding "similar" services, by first pruning the set of discovered services based on service metadata, and subsequently selecting an optimal service based on performance data. The current implementation of the prototype workflow framework is described, and demonstrated with a simple workflow. Performance results are presented that show the performance benefits of dynamic service selection. A statistical analysis based on the first order statistic is used to investigate the likely improvement in service response time arising from dynamic service selection

End-to-End Trust Fulfillment of Big Data Workflow Provisioning over Competing Clouds

Cloud Computing has emerged as a promising and powerful paradigm for delivering data- intensive, high performance computation, applications and services over the Internet. Cloud Computing has enabled the implementation and success of Big Data, a relatively recent phenomenon consisting of the generation and analysis of abundant data from various sources. Accordingly, to satisfy the growing demands of Big Data storage, processing, and analytics, a large market has emerged for Cloud Service Providers, offering a myriad of resources, platforms, and infrastructures. The proliferation of these services often makes it difficult for consumers to select the most suitable and trustworthy provider to fulfill the requirements of building complex workflows and applications in a relatively short time. In this thesis, we first propose a quality specification model to support dual pre- and post-cloud workflow provisioning, consisting of service provider selection and workflow quality enforcement and adaptation. This model captures key properties of the quality of work at different stages of the Big Data value chain, enabling standardized quality specification, monitoring, and adaptation. Subsequently, we propose a two-dimensional trust-enabled framework to facilitate end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement that: 1) automates cloud service provider selection for Big Data workflow processing, and 2) maintains the required QoS levels of Big Data workflows during runtime through dynamic orchestration using multi-model architecture-driven workflow monitoring, prediction, and adaptation. The trust-based automatic service provider selection scheme we propose in this thesis is comprehensive and adaptive, as it relies on a dynamic trust model to evaluate the QoS of a cloud provider prior to taking any selection decisions. It is a multi-dimensional trust model for Big Data workflows over competing clouds that assesses the trustworthiness of cloud providers based on three trust levels: (1) presence of the most up-to-date cloud resource verified capabilities, (2) reputational evidence measured by neighboring users and (3) a recorded personal history of experiences with the cloud provider. The trust-based workflow orchestration scheme we propose aims to avoid performance degradation or cloud service interruption. Our workflow orchestration approach is not only based on automatic adaptation and reconfiguration supported by monitoring, but also on predicting cloud resource shortages, thus preventing performance degradation. We formalize the cloud resource orchestration process using a state machine that efficiently captures different dynamic properties of the cloud execution environment. In addition, we use a model checker to validate our monitoring model in terms of reachability, liveness, and safety properties. We evaluate both our automated service provider selection scheme and cloud workflow orchestration, monitoring and adaptation schemes on a workflow-enabled Big Data application. A set of scenarios were carefully chosen to evaluate the performance of the service provider selection, workflow monitoring and the adaptation schemes we have implemented. The results demonstrate that our service selection outperforms other selection strategies and ensures trustworthy service provider selection. The results of evaluating automated workflow orchestration further show that our model is self-adapting, self-configuring, reacts efficiently to changes and adapts accordingly while enforcing QoS of workflows

Task Runtime Prediction in Scientific Workflows Using an Online Incremental Learning Approach

Many algorithms in workflow scheduling and resource provisioning rely on the performance estimation of tasks to produce a scheduling plan. A profiler that is capable of modeling the execution of tasks and predicting their runtime accurately, therefore, becomes an essential part of any Workflow Management System (WMS). With the emergence of multi-tenant Workflow as a Service (WaaS) platforms that use clouds for deploying scientific workflows, task runtime prediction becomes more challenging because it requires the processing of a significant amount of data in a near real-time scenario while dealing with the performance variability of cloud resources. Hence, relying on methods such as profiling tasks' execution data using basic statistical description (e.g., mean, standard deviation) or batch offline regression techniques to estimate the runtime may not be suitable for such environments. In this paper, we propose an online incremental learning approach to predict the runtime of tasks in scientific workflows in clouds. To improve the performance of the predictions, we harness fine-grained resources monitoring data in the form of time-series records of CPU utilization, memory usage, and I/O activities that are reflecting the unique characteristics of a task's execution. We compare our solution to a state-of-the-art approach that exploits the resources monitoring data based on regression machine learning technique. From our experiments, the proposed strategy improves the performance, in terms of the error, up to 29.89%, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: Accepted for presentation at main conference track of 11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computin

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them