Libra: An Economy driven Job Scheduling System for Clusters

Clusters of computers have emerged as mainstream parallel and distributed platforms for high-performance, high-throughput and high-availability computing. To enable effective resource management on clusters, numerous cluster managements systems and schedulers have been designed. However, their focus has essentially been on maximizing CPU performance, but not on improving the value of utility delivered to the user and quality of services. This paper presents a new computational economy driven scheduling system called Libra, which has been designed to support allocation of resources based on the users? quality of service (QoS) requirements. It is intended to work as an add-on to the existing queuing and resource management system. The first version has been implemented as a plugin scheduler to the PBS (Portable Batch System) system. The scheduler offers market-based economy driven service for managing batch jobs on clusters by scheduling CPU time according to user utility as determined by their budget and deadline rather than system performance considerations. The Libra scheduler ensures that both these constraints are met within an O(n) run-time. The Libra scheduler has been simulated using the GridSim toolkit to carry out a detailed performance analysis. Results show that the deadline and budget based proportional resource allocation strategy improves the utility of the system and user satisfaction as compared to system-centric scheduling strategies.Comment: 13 page

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

D-SPACE4Cloud: A Design Tool for Big Data Applications

The last years have seen a steep rise in data generation worldwide, with the development and widespread adoption of several software projects targeting the Big Data paradigm. Many companies currently engage in Big Data analytics as part of their core business activities, nonetheless there are no tools and techniques to support the design of the underlying hardware configuration backing such systems. In particular, the focus in this report is set on Cloud deployed clusters, which represent a cost-effective alternative to on premises installations. We propose a novel tool implementing a battery of optimization and prediction techniques integrated so as to efficiently assess several alternative resource configurations, in order to determine the minimum cost cluster deployment satisfying QoS constraints. Further, the experimental campaign conducted on real systems shows the validity and relevance of the proposed method