Evaluating the performance and intrusiveness of virtual machines for desktop grid computing

Comunicação apresentada no 3rd Workshop on Desktop Grids and Volunteer Computing Systems, Rome, 2009.We experimentally evaluate the performance overhead of the virtual environments VMware Player, QEMU, VirtualPC and VirtualBox on a dual-core machine. Firstly, we assess the performance of a Linux guest OS running on a virtual machine by separately benchmarking the CPU, file I/O and the network bandwidth. These values are compared to the performance achieved when applications are run on a Linux OS directly over the physical machine. Secondly, we measure the impact that a virtual machine running a volunteer @home project worker causes on a host OS. Results show that performance attainable on virtual machines depends simultaneously on the virtual machine software and on the application type, with CPU-bound applications much less impacted than IO-bound ones. Additionally, the performance impact on the host OS caused by a virtual machine using all the virtual CPU, ranges from 10% to 35%, depending on the virtual environment

An Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment for On-Demand Internet Computing

The Internet has evolved into a global and ubiquitous communication medium interconnecting powerful application servers, diverse desktop computers and mobile notebooks. Along with recent developments in computer technology, such as the convergence of computing and communication devices, the way how people use computers and the Internet has changed people´s working habits and has led to new application scenarios. On the one hand, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and nomadic computing become more and more important since different computing devices like PDAs and notebooks may be used concurrently and alternately, e.g. while the user is on the move. On the other hand, the ubiquitous availability and pervasive interconnection of computing systems have fostered various trends towards the dynamic utilization and spontaneous collaboration of available remote computing resources, which are addressed by approaches like utility computing, grid computing, cloud computing and public computing. From a general point of view, the common objective of this development is the use of Internet applications on demand, i.e. applications that are not installed in advance by a platform administrator but are dynamically deployed and run as they are requested by the application user. The heterogeneous and unmanaged nature of the Internet represents a major challenge for the on demand use of custom Internet applications across heterogeneous hardware platforms, operating systems and network environments. Promising remedies are autonomic computing systems that are supposed to maintain themselves without particular user or application intervention. In this thesis, an Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment (ACOE) is presented that supports On Demand Internet Computing (ODIC), such as dynamic application composition and ad hoc execution migration. The approach is based on an integration middleware called crossware that does not replace existing middleware but operates as a self-managing mediator between diverse application requirements and heterogeneous platform configurations. A Java implementation of the Crossware Development Kit (XDK) is presented, followed by the description of the On Demand Internet Computing System (ODIX). The feasibility of the approach is shown by the implementation of an Internet Application Workbench, an Internet Application Factory and an Internet Peer Federation. They illustrate the use of ODIX to support local, remote and distributed ODIC, respectively. Finally, the suitability of the approach is discussed with respect to the support of ODIC

Service-Oriented Ad Hoc Grid Computing

Subject of this thesis are the design and implementation of an ad hoc Grid infrastructure. The vision of an ad hoc Grid further evolves conventional service-oriented Grid systems into a more robust, more flexible and more usable environment that is still standards compliant and interoperable with other Grid systems. A lot of work in current Grid middleware systems is focused on providing transparent access to high performance computing (HPC) resources (e.g. clusters) in virtual organizations spanning multiple institutions. The ad hoc Grid vision presented in this thesis exceeds this view in combining classical Grid components with more flexible components and usage models, allowing to form an environment combining dedicated HPC-resources with a large number of personal computers forming a "Desktop Grid". Three examples from medical research, media research and mechanical engineering are presented as application scenarios for a service-oriented ad hoc Grid infrastructure. These sample applications are also used to derive requirements for the runtime environment as well as development tools for such an ad hoc Grid environment. These requirements form the basis for the design and implementation of the Marburg ad hoc Grid Environment (MAGE) and the Grid Development Tools for Eclipse (GDT). MAGE is an implementation of a WSRF-compliant Grid middleware, that satisfies the criteria for an ad hoc Grid middleware presented in the introduction to this thesis. GDT extends the popular Eclipse integrated development environment by components that support application development both for traditional service-oriented Grid middleware systems as well as ad hoc Grid infrastructures such as MAGE. These development tools represent the first fully model driven approach to Grid service development integrated with infrastructure management components in service-oriented Grid computing. This thesis is concluded by a quantitative discussion of the performance overhead imposed by the presented extensions to a service-oriented Grid middleware as well as a discussion of the qualitative improvements gained by the overall solution. The conclusion of this thesis also gives an outlook on future developments and areas for further research. One of these qualitative improvements is "hot deployment" the ability to install and remove Grid services in a running node without interrupt to other active services on the same node. Hot deployment has been introduced as a novelty in service-oriented Grid systems as a result of the research conducted for this thesis. It extends service-oriented Grid computing with a new paradigm, making installation of individual application components a functional aspect of the application. This thesis further explores the idea of using peer-to-peer (P2P networking for Grid computing by combining a general purpose P2P framework with a standard compliant Grid middleware. In previous work the application of P2P systems has been limited to replica location and use of P2P index structures for discovery purposes. The work presented in this thesis also uses P2P networking to realize seamless communication accross network barriers. Even though the web service standards have been designed for the internet, the two-way communication requirement introduced by the WSRF-standards and particularly the notification pattern is not well supported by the web service standards. This defficiency can be answered by mechanisms that are part of such general purpose P2P communication frameworks. Existing security infrastructures for Grid systems focus on protection of data during transmission and access control to individual resources or the overall Grid environment. This thesis focuses on security issues within a single node of a dynamically changing service-oriented Grid environment. To counter the security threads arising from the new capabilities of an ad hoc Grid, a number of novel isolation solutions are presented. These solutions address security issues and isolation on a fine-grained level providing a range of applicable basic mechanisms for isolation, ranging from lightweight system call interposition to complete para-virtualization of the operating systems

Overlay virtualized wireless sensor networks for application in industrial internet of things : a review

Abstract: In recent times, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are broadly applied in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in order to enhance the productivity and efficiency of existing and prospective manufacturing industries. In particular, an area of interest that concerns the use of WSNs in IIoT is the concept of sensor network virtualization and overlay networks. Both network virtualization and overlay networks are considered contemporary because they provide the capacity to create services and applications at the edge of existing virtual networks without changing the underlying infrastructure. This capability makes both network virtualization and overlay network services highly beneficial, particularly for the dynamic needs of IIoT based applications such as in smart industry applications, smart city, and smart home applications. Consequently, the study of both WSN virtualization and overlay networks has become highly patronized in the literature, leading to the growth and maturity of the research area. In line with this growth, this paper provides a review of the development made thus far concerning virtualized sensor networks, with emphasis on the application of overlay networks in IIoT. Principally, the process of virtualization in WSN is discussed along with its importance in IIoT applications. Different challenges in WSN are also presented along with possible solutions given by the use of virtualized WSNs. Further details are also presented concerning the use of overlay networks as the next step to supporting virtualization in shared sensor networks. Our discussion closes with an exposition of the existing challenges in the use of virtualized WSN for IIoT applications. In general, because overlay networks will be contributory to the future development and advancement of smart industrial and smart city applications, this review may be considered by researchers as a reference point for those particularly interested in the study of this growing field

A grid computing framework for commercial simulation packages

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.An increased need for collaborative research among different organizations, together with continuing advances in communication technology and computer hardware, has facilitated the development of distributed systems that can provide users non-trivial access to geographically dispersed computing resources (processors, storage, applications, data, instruments, etc.) that are administered in multiple computer domains. The term grid computing or grids is popularly used to refer to such distributed systems. A broader definition of grid computing includes the use of computing resources within an organization for running organization-specific applications. This research is in the context of using grid computing within an enterprise to maximize the use of available hardware and software resources for processing enterprise applications. Large scale scientific simulations have traditionally been the primary benefactor of grid computing. The application of this technology to simulation in industry has, however, been negligible. This research investigates how grid technology can be effectively exploited by simulation practitioners using Windows-based commercially available simulation packages to model simulations in industry. These packages are commonly referred to as Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs). The study identifies several higher level grid services that could be potentially used to support the practise of simulation in industry. It proposes a grid computing framework to investigate these services in the context of CSP-based simulations. This framework is called the CSP-Grid Computing (CSP-GC) Framework. Each identified higher level grid service in this framework is referred to as a CSP-specific service. A total of six case studies are presented to experimentally evaluate how grid computing technologies can be used together with unmodified simulation packages to support some of the CSP-specific services. The contribution of this thesis is the CSP-GC framework that identifies how simulation practise in industry may benefit from the use of grid technology. A further contribution is the recognition of specific grid computing software (grid middleware) that can possibly be used together with existing CSPs to provide grid support. With its focus on end-users and end-user tools, it is intended that this research will encourage wider adoption of grid computing in the workplace and that simulation users will derive benefit from using this technology

XML-VM: An XML-Based Grid Computing Middleware

This paper describes a novel distributing computing middleware named XML-VM. Its architecture is inspired by the \u2018Grid Computing\u2019 paradigm. The proposed system improves many characteristics of previous Grid systems, in particular the description of the distributed computation, the distribution of the code and the execution times. XML is a markup language commonly used to interchange arbitrary data over the Internet. The idea behind this work is to use XML to describe algorithms; XML documents are distributed by means of XML-RPC, interpreted and executed using virtual machines. XML-VM is an assembly-like language, coded in XML. Parsing of XML-VM programs is performed with a fast SAX parser for JAVA. XML-VM interpreter is coded in JAVA. Several algorithms are written in XML-VM and executed in a distributed environment. Representative experimental results are reported

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure