A Distributed Economics-based Infrastructure for Utility Computing

Existing attempts at utility computing revolve around two approaches. The first consists of proprietary solutions involving renting time on dedicated utility computing machines. The second requires the use of heavy, monolithic applications that are difficult to deploy, maintain, and use. We propose a distributed, community-oriented approach to utility computing. Our approach provides an infrastructure built on Web Services in which modular components are combined to create a seemingly simple, yet powerful system. The community-oriented nature generates an economic environment which results in fair transactions between consumers and providers of computing cycles while simultaneously encouraging improvements in the infrastructure of the computational grid itself.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Utility computing: Certification model, costing model, and related architecture development

The purpose of the thesis was to propose one set of solutions to some of the challenges that are delaying the adoption of utility computing on a wider scale. These components enable effective deployment of utility computing, efficient look-up, and comparison of service offerings of different utility computing resource centers connected to the utility computing network

A Study of Grid Applications: Scheduling Perspective

As the Grid evolves from a high performance cluster middleware to a multipurpose utility computing framework, a good understanding of Grid applications, their statistics and utilisation patterns is required. This study looks at job execution times and resource utilisations in a Grid environment, and their significance in cluster and network dimensioning, local level scheduling and resource management

GUISET: A CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF A GRID-ENABLED PORTAL FOR E-COMMERCE ON-DEMAND SERVICES

Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been largely influenced by the usual functional requirements such as security requirements, grid resource requirements and job management requirements. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms mean that additional requirements must be considered in order to realize effective grid-enabled portals design for such platforms. This work investigates those relevant additional requirements that must be considered for the design of grid-enabled portals for utility computing contexts. Based on a thorough review of literature, we identified a number of those relevant additional requirements, and developed a grid-enabled portal prototype for the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for SMME-enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a utility computing platform. The GUISET portal was designed to cater for both the traditional grid requirements and some of the relevant additional requirements for utility computing contexts. The result of the evaluation of the GUISET portal prototype using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for the utility context

Virtualization And Self-organization For Utility Computing

We present an alternative paradigm for utility computing when the delivery of service is subject to binding contracts; the solution we propose is based on resource virtualization and a selfmanagement scheme. A virtual cloud aggregates set virtual machines to work in concert for the tasks specified by the service agreement. A first step for the establishment of a virtual cloud is to create a scale-free overlay network through a biased random walk; scale-free networks enjoy a set of remarkable properties such as: robustness against random failures, favorable scaling, and resilience to congestion, small diameter, and average path length. Constrains such as limits on the cost of per unit of service, total cost, or the requirement to use only “green computing cycles are then considered when a node of this overlay network decides whether to join the virtual cloud or not. A VIRTUAL CLOUD consists of a subset of the nodes assigned to the tasks specified by a Service Level Agreement, SLA, as well as a virtual interconnection network, or overlay network, for the virtual cloud. SLAs could serve as a congestion control mechanism for an organization providing utility computing; this mechanism allows the system to reject new contracts when there is the danger of overloading the system and failing to fulfill existing contractual obligations. The objective of this thesis is to show that biased random walks in power law networks are capable of responding to dynamic changes of the workload in utility computing