Using a Software Product Line Approach in Designing Grid Services

Software Product Line engineering (SPL) has emerged in recent years as a planned approach for software reuse within families of related software products. In SPL, variability and commonality among different members of a family is studied and core assists (system architecture, software components, documentation, etc.) are designed accordingly to maximize reuse within the family members. In this work, we look at how this emerging technology can be relevant to the domain of grid computing and the design of grid services. The GeneGrid project is used to demonstrate the SPL approach

A constraints-based resource discovery model for multi-provider cloud environments

Abstract Abstract Increasingly infrastructure providers are supplying the cloud marketplace with storage and on-demand compute resources to host cloud applications. From an application user’s point of view, it is desirable to identify the most appropriate set of available resources on which to execute an application. Resource choice can be complex and may involve comparing available hardware specifications, operating systems, value-added services (such as network configuration or data replication) and operating costs (such as hosting cost and data throughput). Providers’ cost models often change and new commodity cost models (such as spot pricing) can offer significant savings. In this paper, a software abstraction layer is used to discover the most appropriate infrastructure resources for a given application, by applying a two-phase constraints-based approach to a multi-provider cloud environment. In the first phase, a set of possible infrastructure resources is identified for the application. In the second phase, a suitable heuristic is used to select the most appropriate resources from the initial set. For some applications a cost-based heuristic may be most appropriate; for others a performance-based heuristic may be of greater relevance. A financial services application and a high performance computing application are used to illustrate the execution of the proposed resource discovery mechanism. The experimental results show that the proposed model can dynamically select appropriate resouces for an application’s requirements. </jats:sec

Parallel programming /

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