Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

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

The Clarens Web Service Framework for Distributed Scientific Analysis in Grid Projects

Large scientific collaborations are moving towards service oriented architecutres for implementation and deployment of globally distributed systems. Clarens is a high performance, easy to deploy Web Service framework that supports the construction of such globally distributed systems. This paper discusses some of the core functionality of Clarens that the authors believe is important for building distributed systems based on Web Services that support scientific analysis

A GRID-BASED E-LEARNING MODEL FOR OPEN UNIVERSITIES

E-learning has grown to become a widely accepted method of learning all over the world. As a result, many e-learning platforms which have been developed based on varying technologies were faced with some limitations ranging from storage capability, computing power, to availability or access to the learning support infrastructures. This has brought about the need to develop ways to effectively manage and share the limited resources available in the e-learning platform. Grid computing technology has the capability to enhance the quality of pedagogy on the e-learning platform. In this paper we propose a Grid-based e-learning model for Open Universities. An attribute of such universities is the setting up of multiple remotely located campuses within a country. The grid-based e-learning model presented in this work possesses the attributes of an elegant architectural framework that will facilitate efficient use of available e-learning resources and cost reduction, leading to general improvement of the overall quality of the operations of open universities

Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

The Clarens web services architecture

Clarens is a uniquely flexible web services infrastructure providing a unified access protocol to a diverse set of functions useful to the HEP community. It uses the standard HTTP protocol combined with application layer, certificate based authentication to provide single sign-on to individuals, organizations and hosts, with fine-grained access control to services, files and virtual organization (VO) management. This contribution describes the server functionality, while client applications are described in a subsequent talk.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, PSN MONT00