Self-organising management of Grid environments

This paper presents basic concepts, architectural principles and algorithms for efficient resource and security management in cluster computing environments and the Grid. The work presented in this paper is funded by BTExacT and the EPSRC project SO-GRM (GR/S21939)

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

A Weekly Coupled Adaptive Gossip Protocol for Application Level Active Networks

With the sharp increase in heterogeneity and distribution of elements in wide-area networks, more flexible, efficient and autonomous approaches for management and information distribution are needed. This paper proposes a novel approach, based on gossip protocols and firefly synchronisation theory, for the management policy distribution and synchronisation over a number of nodes in an Application Level Active Network (ALAN). The work is presented in the context of the IST project ANDROID (Active Network Distributed Open Infrastructure Development), which is developing an autonomous policy-based management system for ALAN. The preliminary simulation results suggest that with the appropriately optimised parameters, the algorithms developed are scalable, can work effectively in a realistic random network, and allow the policy updates to be distributed efficiently throughout the active network with a lower latency than other similar types of gossip protocols

Improving similarity search in time series using wavelets

Sequences constitute a large portion of data stored in databases. Data mining applications require the ability to process similarity queries over a large amount of time series data. The query processing performance is an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration. This article proposes a similarity retrieval algorithm for time series. The proposed approach utilizes wavelet transformation in order to reduce the dimensionality of the time series. The transformed series are indexed using X-Trees, which is a spatial indexing technique able to efficiently index high-dimensional data. The article proves that this technique outperforms the usage of the Fourier transformation, since the wavelet transformation provides better approximation of the time series. Through the experiments, it can be concluded that the optimum performance is obtained using 16 to 20 wavelet coefficients. Furthermore, a novel mechanism for reducing the complexity of the calculation for the false alarms removal is proposed. Storing the approximation coefficients of the penultimate level of the decomposition tree, the Euclidean distance between the two sequences is calculated, thus reducing further the number of false alarms before calculating the actual Euclidean distance using the complete time series. The article concludes with a detailed performance evaluation of the proposed similarity retrieval algorithm using data from the Greek stock market and the temperature measurements from Athens. The comparison is done with techniques that use the Haar transform and the R*-Tree, and the proposed algorithm is shown to outperform them

SEE-GRID eInfrastructure for regional eScience

In the past 6 years, a number of targeted initiatives, funded by the European Commission via its information society and RTD programmes and Greek infrastructure development actions, have articulated a successful regional development actions in South East Europe that can be used as a role model for other international developments. The SEEREN (South-East European Research and Education Networking initiative) project, through its two phases, established the SEE segment of the pan-European G 'EANT network and successfully connected the research and scientific communities in the region. Currently, the SEE-LIGHT project is working towards establishing a dark-fiber backbone that will interconnect most national Research and Education networks in the region. On the distributed computing and storage provisioning i.e. Grid plane, the SEE-GRID (South-East European GRID e-Infrastructure Development) project, similarly through its two phases, has established a strong human network in the area of scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure, and attracted a number of applications from different fields from countries throughout the South-East Europe. The current SEEGRID-SCI project, ending in April 2010, empowers the regional user communities from fields of meteorology, seismology and environmental protection in common use and sharing of the regional e-Infrastructure. Current technical initiatives in formulation are focusing on a set of coordinated actions in the area of HPC and application fields making use of HPC initiatives. Finally, the current SEERA-EI project brings together policy makers - programme managers from 10 countries in the region. The project aims to establish a communication platform between programme managers, pave the way towards common e-Infrastructure strategy and vision, and implement concrete actions for common funding of electronic infrastructures on the regional level. The regional vision on establishing an e-Infrastructure compatible with European developments, and empowering the scientists in the region in equal participation in the use of pan-European infrastructures, is materializing through the above initiatives. This model has a number of concrete operational and organizational guidelines which can be adapted to help e-Infrastructure developments in other world regions. In this paper we review the most important developments and contributions by the SEEGRID-SCI project

Security and Resource Policy-based Management Architecture for ALAN Servers

Abstract: Application Layer Active Networks (ALAN) allow quick and efficient deployment, on the active servers, of user-customised services (proxylets). Programmability above the transport layer makes this approach distinct form other active network initiatives. This scenario raises the issues of efficient resource management on the active server. Moreover, the deployment of userspecified processes has to be highly secure so as not to harm the active server operator platform. The IST project ANDROID is using a flexible generic specification for policies, in XML, allowing a wide range of policies to be expressed and processed in a common framework. This paper presents the security and resource management architecture developed to support the application of the ANDROID policy-based principles to manage the ALAN servers. We present the architecture, as well as the sample policy sets. The prototype security and resource management implementation were demonstrated during two real-life trials and the results are presented here. Key words: ALAN, Policy-based management, XML, Resource and security management. 1. INTRODUCTION AND PROBLE

An SMIng-centric proxy agent for integrated monitoring and provisioning

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceThe combined use of SNMP and policy based frameworks is growing very fast. From both an information model and programmation interface point of view, an integrated view is highly desirable. Several approaches have been proposed so far in the information model sphere. In this paper we present the experience gained in using the SMIng approach for building an integrated management environment that provides seamless integration of both policy provisioning and MIB monitoring. The developed management environment has been deployed for managing an active network called FLAME, dedicated to dynamic IP monitoring

Integration of the laboratory instruments with e-Infrastructure

A combination of networks, computational, storage infrastructure and the scientific instrumentation (equipped with sensor networks) composes a new kind of e-Infrastructure. The integration of scientific instruments into e-Infrastructure empowers possibilities in conducting experiments. The development of technologies that allow remote and shared access to laboratory instruments opens up new opportunities for researchers. This paper presents an approach to integrate the laboratory instruments with e-Infrastructure, focusing on the results of the EU FP7 DORII project