On the use of intelligent models towards meeting the challenges of the edge mesh

Nowadays, we are witnessing the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) with numerous devices performing interactions between them or with their environment. The huge number of devices leads to huge volumes of data that demand the appropriate processing. The “legacy” approach is to rely on Cloud where increased computational resources can realize any desired processing. However, the need for supporting real-time applications requires a reduced latency in the provision of outcomes. Edge Computing (EC) comes as the “solver” of the latency problem. Various processing activities can be performed at EC nodes having direct connection with IoT devices. A number of challenges should be met before we conclude a fully automated ecosystem where nodes can cooperate or understand their status to efficiently serve applications. In this article, we perform a survey of the relevant research activities towards the vision of Edge Mesh (EM), i.e., a “cover” of intelligence upon the EC. We present the necessary hardware and discuss research outcomes in every aspect of EC/EM nodes functioning. We present technologies and theories adopted for data, tasks, and resource management while discussing how machine learning and optimization can be adopted in the domain

XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment Third Quarter 2012 Report

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. It is an integrated cyberinfrastructure ecosystem with singular interfaces for allocations, support, and other key services that researchers can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise.This a report of project activities and highlights from the third quarter of 2012.National Science Foundation, OCI-105357

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

Integrating acceleration devices using CometCloud

Application accelerators can include GPUs, cell processors, FPGAs and other custom application specific integrated circuit (ASICs) based devices. A number of challenges arise when these devices must be integrated as part of a single computing environment, relating to both the diversity of devices and the supported programming models. One key challenge we consider here is the selection of the most appropriate device for accelerating a particular application. Our approach makes use of a broker-based matchmaking system, which attempts to compare the capability of a device with one or more application kernels, utilising the CometCloud tuple space-based coordination mechanism to facilitate the matchmaking process. We describe the architecture of our system and how it utilises performance prediction to select devices for particular application kernels. We demonstrate that within a highly dynamic HPC system, our approach can increase the performance of applications by using code porting techniques to the most suitable device found, also; (a) allowing the dynamic addition of new devices to the system, and (b) allowing applications to fall back and utilise the best alternative device available if the preferred device cannot be found or is unavailable