Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management

We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.NSF (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, CNS-052016, CCR-0635102); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana; COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología "Francisco José de Caldas

Resource Brokering in Grid Computing

Grid Computing has emerged in the academia and evolved towards the bases of what is currently known as Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT). The vast collection of resources that provide the nature for Grid Computing environment is very complex; multiple administrative domains control access and set policies to the shared computing resources. It is a decentralized environment with geographically distributed computing and storage resources, where each computing resource can be modeled as an autonomous computing entity, yet collectively can work together. This is a class of Cooperative Distributed Systems (CDS). We extend this by applying characteristic of open environments to create a foundation for the next generation of computing platform where entities are free to join a computing environment to provide capabilities and take part as a collective in solving complex problems beyond the capability of a single entity. This thesis is focused on modeling “Computing” as a collective performance of individual autonomous fundamental computing elements interconnected in a “Grid” open environment structure. Each computing element is a node in the Grid. All nodes are interconnected through the “Grid” edges. Resource allocation is done at the edges of the “Grid” where the connected nodes are simply used to perform computation. The analysis put forward in this thesis identifies Grid Computing as a form of computing that occurs at the resource level. The proposed solution, coupled with advancements in technology and evolution of new computing paradigms, sets a new direction for grid computing research. The approach here is a leap forward with the well-defined set of requirements and specifications based on open issues with the focus on autonomy, adaptability and interdependency. The proposed approach examines current model for Grid Protocol Architecture and proposes an extension that addresses the open issues in the diverged set of solutions that have been created

Environment determinants in business adoption of Cloud Computing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of Technology Providers, Public Administrations and R&D Institutions on Cloud Computing adoption. This research also considers Killer Applications and Success Cases as other environmental factors. Design/methodology/approach – Factorial analyses and structural equation models were used on a sample of high-technology firms located in technological parks in Southern Europe, with more than ten employees and sustained investments in R&D. Findings – Results show that Technology Providers and Success Cases are determinant in Cloud Computing adoption. Moreover, Killer Applications are a forerunner for Success Cases. Practical implications – An appropriate fit between the tools and resources provided by suppliers and the internal resources of the company is needed to create competitive advantages. Firms should evaluate Technology Providers, identify Success Cases to Cloud Computing adoption and implement technological benchmarking. Originality/value – This study contributes to Cloud Computing adoption literature because it includes Technology Providers, Public Administrations and R&D Institutions simultaneously as well as other variables as Killer Applications and Success Cases. The importance of the external agents on information technology (IT) adoption, especially when the technologies to be adopted are new and in an emergent stage, together with the lack of prior investigations focusing on specific environmental factors affecting the adoption of these new, emerging IT, justify the value of this research

Alpha Entanglement Codes: Practical Erasure Codes to Archive Data in Unreliable Environments

Data centres that use consumer-grade disks drives and distributed peer-to-peer systems are unreliable environments to archive data without enough redundancy. Most redundancy schemes are not completely effective for providing high availability, durability and integrity in the long-term. We propose alpha entanglement codes, a mechanism that creates a virtual layer of highly interconnected storage devices to propagate redundant information across a large scale storage system. Our motivation is to design flexible and practical erasure codes with high fault-tolerance to improve data durability and availability even in catastrophic scenarios. By flexible and practical, we mean code settings that can be adapted to future requirements and practical implementations with reasonable trade-offs between security, resource usage and performance. The codes have three parameters. Alpha increases storage overhead linearly but increases the possible paths to recover data exponentially. Two other parameters increase fault-tolerance even further without the need of additional storage. As a result, an entangled storage system can provide high availability, durability and offer additional integrity: it is more difficult to modify data undetectably. We evaluate how several redundancy schemes perform in unreliable environments and show that alpha entanglement codes are flexible and practical codes. Remarkably, they excel at code locality, hence, they reduce repair costs and become less dependent on storage locations with poor availability. Our solution outperforms Reed-Solomon codes in many disaster recovery scenarios.Comment: The publication has 12 pages and 13 figures. This work was partially supported by Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF Doc.Mobility 162014, 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN

Logistics and cloud computing service providers’ cooperation: a resilience perspective

Cloud computing (CC) services can offer substantial cost-effective global operational and relationship benefits if the cooperation between logistics and CC services are resilient. Potential vulnerabilities to cooperation of CC and logistics service providers can occur with respect to vital factors such as security and trust. Extant studies have demonstrated CC benefits as well as few challenges associated with CC services application. However, no extant study has examined the inter-organisational benefits based on cooperative resilience between CC and logistics service providers in terms of both capability and trust vulnerability factors. This study examines the cooperative resilience of logistics and CC service providers based on innovation diffusion theory (IDT) within a supply-chain risk assessment framework. Using structural equation modelling techniques we investigate the relationship between the vulnerability factor (trust), capability factor (security) and collaboration benefits (relationship and operational) offered by CC service providers based on 236 Chinese logistics service firms’ perceptions of cloud computing adoption. The results indicate Chinese logistics companies perceive security impediments as a major factor affecting cooperative resilience between logistics service and CC service providers

The Development of Government Information Infrastructure: The case of Government Cloud Computing in Oman (13)

This paper investigates the roles of institutional isomorphic mechanism in Information Infrastructure (II) implementation. It explores a type of cloud computing namely; Infrastructure as a Service in the context of its national government implementation in Oman. The research answers the following research question; how institutional isomorphic mechanisms impact the Cloud Computing Implementation? The findings revealed that institutional isomorphic mechanisms played a major role in the implementation of government Cloud Computing project in Oman and in particular the Coercive and mimetic mechanisms. Practical and theoretical implications of the findings are then discussed