6,408 research outputs found
A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing
With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and
engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process
large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources.
Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex
workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of
workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a
taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and
executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid
workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the
comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design
and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid
workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure
Considering Human Aspects on Strategies for Designing and Managing Distributed Human Computation
A human computation system can be viewed as a distributed system in which the
processors are humans, called workers. Such systems harness the cognitive power
of a group of workers connected to the Internet to execute relatively simple
tasks, whose solutions, once grouped, solve a problem that systems equipped
with only machines could not solve satisfactorily. Examples of such systems are
Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Zooniverse platform. A human computation
application comprises a group of tasks, each of them can be performed by one
worker. Tasks might have dependencies among each other. In this study, we
propose a theoretical framework to analyze such type of application from a
distributed systems point of view. Our framework is established on three
dimensions that represent different perspectives in which human computation
applications can be approached: quality-of-service requirements, design and
management strategies, and human aspects. By using this framework, we review
human computation in the perspective of programmers seeking to improve the
design of human computation applications and managers seeking to increase the
effectiveness of human computation infrastructures in running such
applications. In doing so, besides integrating and organizing what has been
done in this direction, we also put into perspective the fact that the human
aspects of the workers in such systems introduce new challenges in terms of,
for example, task assignment, dependency management, and fault prevention and
tolerance. We discuss how they are related to distributed systems and other
areas of knowledge.Comment: 3 figures, 1 tabl
Multi-agent systems for power engineering applications - part 1 : Concepts, approaches and technical challenges
This is the first part of a 2-part paper that has arisen from the work of the IEEE Power Engineering Society's Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Working Group. Part 1 of the paper examines the potential value of MAS technology to the power industry. In terms of contribution, it describes fundamental concepts and approaches within the field of multi-agent systems that are appropriate to power engineering applications. As well as presenting a comprehensive review of the meaningful power engineering applications for which MAS are being investigated, it also defines the technical issues which must be addressed in order to accelerate and facilitate the uptake of the technology within the power and energy sector. Part 2 of the paper explores the decisions inherent in engineering multi-agent systems for applications in the power and energy sector and offers guidance and recommendations on how MAS can be designed and implemented
Fault Tolerant Resource Allocation for Query Processing in Grid Environments
International audienceIn this paper, we propose a new algorithm for fault-tolerant resource allocation for query processing in grid environments. For this, we propose an initial resource allocation algorithm followed by a fault-tolerance protocol. The proposed fault-tolerance protocol is based on the passive replication of stateful operators in queries. We provide theoretical analyses of the proposed algorithms and consolidate our analyses with the simulations
Towards trusted volunteer grid environments
Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be
considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems
relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are
dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require
enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified
into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are
solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids
where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but
instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any
other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners
without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several
advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are
very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose
distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such
environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that
every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the
same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security
problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution
based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of
access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted
volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201
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