HotGrid: Graduated Access to Grid-based Science Gateways

We describe the idea of a Science Gateway, an application-specific task wrapped as a web service, and some examples of these that are being implemented on the US TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure. We also describe HotGrid, a means of providing simple, immediate access to the Grid through one of these gateways, which we hope will broaden the use of the Grid, drawing in a wide community of users. The secondary purpose of HotGrid is to acclimate a science community to the concepts of certificate use. Our system provides these weakly authenticated users with immediate power to use the Grid resources for science, but without the dangerous power of running arbitrary code. We describe the implementation of these Science Gateways with the Clarens secure web server

Efficient resource management for virtual desktop cloud computing

In virtual desktop cloud computing, user applications are executed in virtual desktops on remote servers. This offers great advantages in terms of usability and resource utilization; however, handling a large amount of clients in the most efficient manner poses important challenges. Especially deciding how many clients to handle on one server, and where to execute the user applications at each time is important. Assigning too many users to one server leads to customer dissatisfaction, while assigning too little leads to higher investments costs. We study different aspects to optimize the resource usage and customer satisfaction. The results of the paper indicate that the resource utilization can increase with 29% by applying the proposed optimizations. Up to 36.6% energy can be saved when the size of the online server pool is adapted to the system load by putting redundant hosts into sleep mode

A Machine Learning Approach for Desktop and Application Virtualization Design in Cloud Environment

In recent years, virtual desktop and virtual application is the important research topic for virtualization of cloud computing. Virtualization provides many benefits by using virtual machine software, including we can efficiently deploy and manage all of virtual system resources, and it offers the ability of high reliability, high elasticity and customization. In order to share the system and software resources, related basic knowledge show in our paper about the virtualization technology of desktop and application, and we proposed the virtual desktop and application services to offer an efficient and elastic service for cloud platform. A machine learning approach is also applied to manage resource allocation. It implements the VDaaS (Virtual Desktop as a Service) and VAaaS (Virtual Application as a Service) by developing the sharing technology for virtual desktop and virtual application with the cloud platform

04451 Abstracts Collection -- Future Generation Grids

The Dagstuhl Seminar 04451 "Future Generation Grid" was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl from 1st to 5th November 2004. The focus of the seminar was on open problems and future challenges in the design of next generation Grid systems. A total of 45 participants presented their current projects, research plans, and new ideas in the area of Grid technologies. Several evening sessions with vivid discussions on future trends complemented the talks. This report gives an overview of the background and the findings of the seminar

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

Personal mobile grids with a honeybee inspired resource scheduler

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended

Advances in Grid Computing

This book approaches the grid computing with a perspective on the latest achievements in the field, providing an insight into the current research trends and advances, and presenting a large range of innovative research papers. The topics covered in this book include resource and data management, grid architectures and development, and grid-enabled applications. New ideas employing heuristic methods from swarm intelligence or genetic algorithm and quantum encryption are considered in order to explain two main aspects of grid computing: resource management and data management. The book addresses also some aspects of grid computing that regard architecture and development, and includes a diverse range of applications for grid computing, including possible human grid computing system, simulation of the fusion reaction, ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning and complex water systems