On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons

Making distributed computing infrastructures interoperable and accessible for e-scientists at the level of computational workflows

As distributed computing infrastructures evolve, and as their take up by user communities is growing, the importance of making different types of infrastructures based on a heterogeneous set of middleware interoperable is becoming crucial. This PhD submission, based on twenty scientific publications, presents a unique solution to the challenge of the seamless interoperation of distributed computing infrastructures at the level of workflows. The submission investigates workflow level interoperation inside a particular workflow system (intra-workflow interoperation), and also between different workflow solutions (inter-workflow interoperation). In both cases the interoperation of workflow component execution and the feeding of data into these components workflow components are considered. The invented and developed framework enables the execution of legacy applications and grid jobs and services on multiple grid systems, the feeding of data from heterogeneous file and data storage solutions to these workflow components, and the embedding of non-native workflows to a hosting meta-workflow. Moreover, the solution provides a high level user interface that enables e-scientist end-users to conveniently access the interoperable grid solutions without requiring them to study or understand the technical details of the underlying infrastructure. The candidate has also developed an application porting methodology that enables the systematic porting of applications to interoperable and interconnected grid infrastructures, and facilitates the exploitation of the above technical framework

Intermediate QoS Prototype for the EDGI Infrastructure

This document provides the first deliverable of EDGI JRA2. It is produced by the INRIA team, the SZTAKI team, the LAL/IN2P3 team and the University of Coimbra team. This document aims at describing achievements and results of JRA2 tasks "Advanced QoS Scheduler and Oracle" and "Support In Science Gateway". Hybrid Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) allow users to combine Grids, Desktop Grids, Clouds, etc. to obtain for their users large computing capabilities. The EDGI infrastructure belongs to this kind of DCIs. The document presents the SpeQuloS framework to provide quality of service (QoS) for application executed on the EDGI infrastructure. It also introduces EDGI QoS portal, an user-friendly and integrated access to QoS features for users of EDGI infrastructure. In this document, we first introduce new results from JRA2.1 task, which collected and analyzed batch execution on Desktop Grid. Then, we present the advanced Cloud Scheduling and Oracle strategies designed inside the SpeQuloS framework (task JRA2.2). We demonstrate efficiency of these strategies using performance evaluation carried out with simulations. Next, we introduce Credit System architecture and QoS user portal as part of the JRA2 Support In Science Gateway (task JRA2.3). Finally, we conclude and provide references to JRA2 production.Ce document fournit le premier livrable pour la tâche JRA2 du projet européen European Desktop Grid Initiative (FP7 EDGI). Il est produit par les équipes de l'INRIA, de SZTAKI, du LAL/IN2P3 et de l'Université de Coimbra. Ce document vise à décrire les réalisations et les résultats qui concernent la qualité de service pour l'infrastructure de grilles de PCs européenne EDGI

Contributions to Desktop Grid Computing : From High Throughput Computing to Data-Intensive Sciences on Hybrid Distributed Computing Infrastructures

Since the mid 90’s, Desktop Grid Computing - i.e the idea of using a large number of remote PCs distributed on the Internet to execute large parallel applications - has proved to be an efficient paradigm to provide a large computational power at the fraction of the cost of a dedicated computing infrastructure.This document presents my contributions over the last decade to broaden the scope of Desktop Grid Computing. My research has followed three different directions. The first direction has established new methods to observe and characterize Desktop Grid resources and developed experimental platforms to test and validate our approach in conditions close to reality. The second line of research has focused on integrating Desk- top Grids in e-science Grid infrastructure (e.g. EGI), which requires to address many challenges such as security, scheduling, quality of service, and more. The third direction has investigated how to support large-scale data management and data intensive applica- tions on such infrastructures, including support for the new and emerging data-oriented programming models.This manuscript not only reports on the scientific achievements and the technologies developed to support our objectives, but also on the international collaborations and projects I have been involved in, as well as the scientific mentoring which motivates my candidature for the Habilitation `a Diriger les Recherches

The Center for Component Technology for Terascale Software Simulation (CCTTSS) at Indiana University

Final report for the Indiana University portion of the CCTTSS project

Service-oriented production grids and user support

Currently several production Grids offer their resources for academic communities. These Grids are resource-oriented Grids with minimal user support. The existing user support incorporates Grid portals without workflow editing and execution capabilities, brokering with no QoS and SLA management, security solutions without privacy and trust management, etc. They do not provide any kind of support for running legacy code applications on Grids. Production Grids started the migration from resource-oriented Grids to service-oriented ones. The migration defines additional requirements towards the user support. These requirements include solving interoperability among Grids, automatic service deployment, dynamic user management, legacy code support, QoA and SLA-based brokering, etc. This paper discusses some aspects of the user support needed for service-oriented production Grids

Cooperative fault-tolerant distributed computing U.S. Department of Energy Grant DE-FG02-02ER25537 Final Report

The Harness project has developed novel software frameworks for the execution of high-end simulations in a fault-tolerant manner on distributed resources. The H2O subsystem comprises the kernel of the Harness framework, and controls the key functions of resource management across multiple administrative domains, especially issues of access and allocation. It is based on a “pluggable” architecture that enables the aggregated use of distributed heterogeneous resources for high performance computing. The major contributions of the Harness II project result in significantly enhancing the overall computational productivity of high-end scientific applications by enabling robust, failure-resilient computations on cooperatively pooled resource collections

Workflow level interoperation of grid data resources

The lack of widely accepted standards and the use of different middleware solutions divide today’s Grid resources into non-interoperable production Grid islands. On the other hand, more and more experiments require such a large number of resources that the interoperation of existing production Grids becomes inevitable. This paper, based on the current results of grid interoperation studies, defines generic requirements towards the workflow level interoperation of grid solutions. It concentrates on intra-workflow interoperation of grid data resources, as one of the key areas of generic interoperation, and describes through an example how existing tools can be extended to achieve the required level of interoperation