Secure Integration of Desktop Grids and Compute Clusters Based on Virtualization and Meta-Scheduling

Reducing the cost for business or scientific computations, is a commonly expressed goal in today’s companies. Using the available computers of local employees or the outsourcing of such computations are two obvious solutions to save money for additional hardware. Both possibilities exhibit security related disadvantages, since the deployed software and data can be copied or tampered if appropriate countermeasures are not taken. In this paper, an approach is presented to let a local desktop machines and remote cluster resources be securely combined into a singel Grid environment. Solutions to several problems in the areas of secure virtual networks, meta-scheduling and accessing cluster schedulers from desktop Grids are proposed

On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence

A Survey on Load Balancing Algorithms for VM Placement in Cloud Computing

The emergence of cloud computing based on virtualization technologies brings huge opportunities to host virtual resource at low cost without the need of owning any infrastructure. Virtualization technologies enable users to acquire, configure and be charged on pay-per-use basis. However, Cloud data centers mostly comprise heterogeneous commodity servers hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs) with potential various specifications and fluctuating resource usages, which may cause imbalanced resource utilization within servers that may lead to performance degradation and service level agreements (SLAs) violations. To achieve efficient scheduling, these challenges should be addressed and solved by using load balancing strategies, which have been proved to be NP-hard problem. From multiple perspectives, this work identifies the challenges and analyzes existing algorithms for allocating VMs to PMs in infrastructure Clouds, especially focuses on load balancing. A detailed classification targeting load balancing algorithms for VM placement in cloud data centers is investigated and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to the classification. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and comparative understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by providing an insight for potential future enhancements.Comment: 22 Pages, 4 Figures, 4 Tables, in pres

Enhancing Job Scheduling of an Atmospheric Intensive Data Application

Nowadays, e-Science applications involve great deal of data to have more accurate analysis. One of its application domains is the Radio Occultation which manages satellite data. Grid Processing Management is a physical infrastructure geographically distributed based on Grid Computing, that is implemented for the overall processing Radio Occultation analysis. After a brief description of algorithms adopted to characterize atmospheric profiles, the paper presents an improvement of job scheduling in order to decrease processing time and optimize resource utilization. Extension of grid computing capacity is implemented by virtual machines in existing physical Grid in order to satisfy temporary job requests. Also scheduling plays an important role in the infrastructure that is handled by a couple of schedulers which are developed to manage data automaticall