HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

Resource management in a containerized cloud : status and challenges

Cloud computing heavily relies on virtualization, as with cloud computing virtual resources are typically leased to the consumer, for example as virtual machines. Efficient management of these virtual resources is of great importance, as it has a direct impact on both the scalability and the operational costs of the cloud environment. Recently, containers are gaining popularity as virtualization technology, due to the minimal overhead compared to traditional virtual machines and the offered portability. Traditional resource management strategies however are typically designed for the allocation and migration of virtual machines, so the question arises how these strategies can be adapted for the management of a containerized cloud. Apart from this, the cloud is also no longer limited to the centrally hosted data center infrastructure. New deployment models have gained maturity, such as fog and mobile edge computing, bringing the cloud closer to the end user. These models could also benefit from container technology, as the newly introduced devices often have limited hardware resources. In this survey, we provide an overview of the current state of the art regarding resource management within the broad sense of cloud computing, complementary to existing surveys in literature. We investigate how research is adapting to the recent evolutions within the cloud, being the adoption of container technology and the introduction of the fog computing conceptual model. Furthermore, we identify several challenges and possible opportunities for future research

Migrating medical communications software to a multi-tenant cloud environment

The rise of cloud computing has paved the way for many new applications. Many of these new cloud applications are also multi-tenant, ensuring multiple end users can make use of the same application instance. While these technologies make it possible to create many new applications, many legacy applications can also benefit from the added flexibility and cost-savings of cloud computing and multi-tenancy. In this paper, we describe the steps required to migrate a. NET-based medical communications application to the Windows Azure public cloud environment, and the steps required to add multi-tenancy to the application. We then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our migration approach. We found that the migration to the cloud itself requires only a limited amount of changes to the application, but that this also limited the benefits, as individual instances would only be partially used. Adding multi-tenancy requires more changes, but when this is done, it has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of running the application

Clouds + Games: A multifaceted approach

The computer game landscape is changing: people play games on multiple computing devices with heterogeneous form-factors, capability, and connectivity. Providing high playability on such devices concurrently is difficult. To enhance the gaming experience, designers could leverage abundant and elastic cloud resources, but current cloud platforms aren't optimized for highly interactive games. Existing studies focus on streaming-based cloud gaming, which is a special case for the more general cloud game architecture. The authors explain how to integrate techniques from the cloud and game research communities into a complete architecture for enhanced online gaming quality. They examine several open issues that appear only when clouds and games are put together. © 2014 IEEE

Parallel Differential Evolution approach for Cloud workflow placements under simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives

International audienceThe recent rapid expansion of Cloud computing facilities triggers an attendant challenge to facility providers and users for methods for optimal placement of workflows on distributed resources, under the often-contradictory impulses of minimizing makespan, energy consumption, and other metrics. Evolutionary Optimization techniques that from theoretical principles are guaranteed to provide globally optimum solutions, are among the most powerful tools to achieve such optimal placements. Multi-Objective Evolutionary algorithms by design work upon contradictory objectives, gradually evolving across generations towards a converged Pareto front representing optimal decision variables – in this case the mapping of tasks to resources on clusters. However the computation time taken by such algorithms for convergence makes them prohibitive for real time placements because of the adverse impact on makespan. This work describes parallelization, on the same cluster, of a Multi-Objective Differential Evolution method (NSDE-2) for optimization of workflow placement, and the attendant speedups that bring the implicit accuracy of the method into the realm of practical utility. Experimental validation is performed on a real-life testbed using diverse Cloud traces. The solutions under different scheduling policies demonstrate significant reduction in energy consumption with some improvement in makespan

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office between counter-terrorism and strengthening of the European citizens’ safety

The European Union needs to be provided with appropriate instruments to face the recent challenges regarding the fight against transnational terrorism, and especially after the facts of Paris in 2015 and of Brussels in 2016. The need is to go beyond the simple emergency measures and to establish a stable mechanism. These serious offences, although carried out on the territory of a single Member State, develop through a preparation process distributed on that of more Member States and non-EU countries. The executing authors are not only citizens of third countries, but more and more often they are EU citizens. Europol and Eurojust, the two agencies responsible for the improvement of the cooperation among the competent authorities in terrorism matters of the Member States have failed so far, thus demonstrating that something more than ancillary bodies is needed. There is a need to create a leading European mechanism in the fight against terrorism. For these reasons, the creation of a European Public Prosecutor’s Office is urgent, one that is able to start investigations on a European basis, facilitate the exchange of information among investigating authorities for evidence purposes in criminal proceedings, prevent and combat terrorist offences with effective actions. The current proposal under discussion in the Council provides the possibility that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office could only act on financial offences and it regulates the creation of a decentralised structure, composed of a central Office and Delegated European Public Prosecutors in the single Member States. As regards the investigative action, a shared and priority competence is provided over the ones of the national prosecutor offices. In addition, the project contains a clause for minimum guarantee regarding the right to defence, strengthening the rights of suspect European citizens and of other involved parties. The legal basis used for the establishment of the EPPO, Article 86 TFEU, provides under paragraph 4 the possibility to extend the competences of the Office to the inclusion of other serious transnational offences, among which there are certainly acts of terrorism. The idea that the territory of the Union, or at least of the Member States which will join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), can be considered as a whole judicial area for investigative purposes on offences within its jurisdiction, and that an exclusive European judicial authority can investigate there, should be seen as an opportunity for an effective response to terrorist threats. Despite this, in the analysis of the current proposal for the establishment of the EPPO, it does not seem plausible to think that it can also deal with these serious offences. Actually, the Member States are opposing this possibility and try to face the terrorism challenges by locking themselves behind national borders. On the contrary, the provision of a competence concerning the fight against these serious offences will provide the Union with an important instrument and will improve the security of the EU citizens

DECIDE: DevOps for Trusted, Portable and Interoperable Multi-Cloud Applications towards the Digital Single Market

The main objective of the DECIDE action is to provide a new generation of multi-cloud service-based software framework, enabling techniques and mechanisms to design, develop, and dynamically deploy multi-cloud aware applications in an ecosystem of reliable, interoperable, and legal compliant cloud services. Three use cases will be conducted to validate the proposed approach.The project leading to this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731533