Performance measuring framework for grid market middleware

Current implementations of Grid infrastructures provide frameworks which aim at achieve on-demand computing. In such a scenario, contribution and use of resources will be governed by business models. The challenge is to provide multi-level performance information which enables the participation of the different actors in such a system. In this paper we describe the performance measuring framework developed for Grid Market Middleware, a middleware which supports economic-model based selection of service-oriented Grid applications. This middleware is a distributed infrastructure, which we have implemented for providing a market of services and resources to be assigned to Grid applications. The objectives of the performance measuring framework is first to assess the behaviour of the middleware and the used economic models in a deployed system, and secondly allow the provision of metrics for the components of the middleware itself. We describe the design of the performance measuring framework, its implementation and show its capability and usefulness for our objectives by experiments.Peer Reviewe

Q-Strategy: A Bidding Strategy for Market-Based Allocation of Grid Services

The application of autonomous agents by the provisioning and usage of computational services is an attractive research field. Various methods and technologies in the area of artificial intelligence, statistics and economics are playing together to achieve i) autonomic service provisioning and usage of Grid services, to invent ii) competitive bidding strategies for widely used market mechanisms and to iii) incentivize consumers and providers to use such market-based systems. The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we present a bidding agent framework for implementing artificial bidding agents, supporting consumers and providers in technical and economic preference elicitation as well as automated bid generation by the requesting and provisioning of Grid services. Secondly, we introduce a novel consumer-side bidding strategy, which enables a goal-oriented and strategic behavior by the generation and submission of consumer service requests and selection of provider offers. Thirdly, we evaluate and compare the Q-strategy, implemented within the presented framework, against the Truth-Telling bidding strategy in three mechanisms – a centralized CDA, a decentralized on-line machine scheduling and a FIFO-scheduling mechanisms

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Business Grid Services

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularize software, enabling loosely coupled and novel synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional software components and specific hosting hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g. intra-, extra- or inter-net). Applying the constructs of grid computing to the service orientation of enterprise software will allow business service networks to utilize more specialized services. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform is presented. Explicit knowledge is required for enterprise software, hosting servers and the domain that can then be utilized by both SLA and reservation systems. The ontology presented is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks

A Factor Framework for Experimental Design for Performance Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services

Given the diversity of commercial Cloud services, performance evaluations of candidate services would be crucial and beneficial for both service customers (e.g. cost-benefit analysis) and providers (e.g. direction of service improvement). Before an evaluation implementation, the selection of suitable factors (also called parameters or variables) plays a prerequisite role in designing evaluation experiments. However, there seems a lack of systematic approaches to factor selection for Cloud services performance evaluation. In other words, evaluators randomly and intuitively concerned experimental factors in most of the existing evaluation studies. Based on our previous taxonomy and modeling work, this paper proposes a factor framework for experimental design for performance evaluation of commercial Cloud services. This framework capsules the state-of-the-practice of performance evaluation factors that people currently take into account in the Cloud Computing domain, and in turn can help facilitate designing new experiments for evaluating Cloud services.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2012), pp. 169-176, Taipei, Taiwan, December 03-06, 201

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