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

Addressing the Challenges in Federating Edge Resources

This book chapter considers how Edge deployments can be brought to bear in a global context by federating them across multiple geographic regions to create a global Edge-based fabric that decentralizes data center computation. This is currently impractical, not only because of technical challenges, but is also shrouded by social, legal and geopolitical issues. In this chapter, we discuss two key challenges - networking and management in federating Edge deployments. Additionally, we consider resource and modeling challenges that will need to be addressed for a federated Edge.Comment: Book Chapter accepted to the Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms; Editors Buyya, Sriram

Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.Comment: Proceedings of 3nd ICST/CREATE-NET Workshop on DIstributed SImulation and Online gaming (DISIO 2012). In conjunction with SIMUTools 2012. Desenzano, Italy, March 2012. ISBN: 978-1-936968-47-

Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view