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

Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 1

In this document the Cat-COVITE Application for use in the CATNETS Project is introduced and motivated. Furthermore an introduction to the catallactic middleware and Web Services Agreement (WS-Agreement) concepts is given as a basis for the future work. Requirements for the application of Cat-COVITE with in catallactic systems are analysed. Finally the integration of the Cat-COVITE application and the catallactic middleware is described. --Grid Computing

Distributed Computing Grid Experiences in CMS

The CMS experiment is currently developing a computing system capable of serving, processing and archiving the large number of events that will be generated when the CMS detector starts taking data. During 2004 CMS undertook a large scale data challenge to demonstrate the ability of the CMS computing system to cope with a sustained data-taking rate equivalent to 25% of startup rate. Its goals were: to run CMS event reconstruction at CERN for a sustained period at 25 Hz input rate; to distribute the data to several regional centers; and enable data access at those centers for analysis. Grid middleware was utilized to help complete all aspects of the challenge. To continue to provide scalable access from anywhere in the world to the data, CMS is developing a layer of software that uses Grid tools to gain access to data and resources, and that aims to provide physicists with a user friendly interface for submitting their analysis jobs. This paper describes the data challenge experience with Grid infrastructure and the current development of the CMS analysis system

DIET : new developments and recent results

Among existing grid middleware approaches, one simple, powerful, and flexibleapproach consists of using servers available in different administrative domainsthrough the classic client-server or Remote Procedure Call (RPC) paradigm.Network Enabled Servers (NES) implement this model also called GridRPC.Clients submit computation requests to a scheduler whose goal is to find aserver available on the grid. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of anNES middleware developed in the GRAAL team called DIET and to describerecent developments. DIET (Distributed Interactive Engineering Toolbox) is ahierarchical set of components used for the development of applications basedon computational servers on the grid.Parmi les intergiciels de grilles existants, une approche simple, flexible et performante consiste a utiliser des serveurs disponibles dans des domaines administratifs différents à travers le paradigme classique de l’appel de procédure àdistance (RPC). Les environnements de ce type, connus sous le terme de Network Enabled Servers, implémentent ce modèle appelé GridRPC. Des clientssoumettent des requêtes de calcul à un ordonnanceur dont le but consiste àtrouver un serveur disponible sur la grille.Le but de cet article est de donner un tour d’horizon d’un intergiciel développédans le projet GRAAL appelé DIET 1. DIET (Distributed Interactive Engineering Toolbox) est un ensemble hiérarchique de composants utilisés pour ledéveloppement d’applications basées sur des serveurs de calcul sur la grille

ARTA: An economic middleware to exchange pervasive energy and computing resources

Studies reveal that an integrated system of smart grid and cloud computing ecosystems can better attain the energy efficiency objectives, considering all the aspects. To facilitate the integration, in this paper, we introduce an agent-oriented economic middleware architecture (ARTA) to exchange pervasive energy and computing resources in different layers of the service provisioning platform, from the edge layer of micro-grid and P2P-cloud to the mass production layer of the giant power plants and data centers. ARTA follows a semi-decentralized economic model by operating through partial system view in the edge-layer negotiations and considers system dynamics and uncertainties in the agents decisions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain