Service and Utility Oriented Distributed Computing Systems: Challenges and Opportunities for Modeling and Simulation Communities

Abstract: Grids and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have emerged as popular platforms for the next generation parallel and distributed computing. In these environments, resources are geographically distributed, managed and owned by various organizations with different policies, and interconnected by wide-area networks or the Internet. This introduces a number of resource management and application scheduling challenges in the domain of security, resource and policy heterogeneity, fault tolerance, dynamic resource conditions.. In these dynamic distributed computing environments, it is hard and challenging to carry out resource management design studies in a repeatable and controlled manner as resources and users are autonomous and distributed across multiple organizations with their own policies. Therefore, simulations have emerged the most feasible technique for analyzing policies for resource allocation. This paper presents emerging trends in distributed computing and their promises for revolutionizing the computing field, and identifies their distinct characteristics and challenges in building them. We motivate opportunities for modeling and simulation communities and present our discrete-event grid simulation toolkit, called GridSim, used by researchers world-wide for investigating the design of utilityoriented computing systems such as Data Centers and Grids. We present various case studies on the use of GridSim in modeling and simulation of Business Grids, parallel applications scheduling, workflow scheduling, and service pricing and revenue management.

A Time Optimization Algorithm for Scheduling Bag-of-Task Applications in Auction-based Proportional Share Systems

Grid and peer-to-peer (P2P) network technologies enable aggregation of distributed resources for solving large-scale and computationally-intensive applications. These technologies are well-suited for Bag-of-Tasks (BoT) applications, because each application consists of many parallel and independent tasks. With multiple users competing for the same resources, the key challenge is to finish a user application within a specified deadline

A Grid Simulation Infrastructure Supporting Advance Reservation

Advance Reservation (AR) for global grids becomes an important research area as it allows users to gain concurrent access for their applications to be executed in parallel, and guarantees the availability of resources at specified future times. Evaluating various AR scenarios can not feasibly be carried out on a real grid environment due to its dynamic nature. Therefore, we extend a GridSim simulation package to support AR for repeatable and controlled evaluations. This paper discusses the design and implementation of AR within GridSim, together with the effects of AR from users' and resources' point of view in the experiments