Enabling Adaptive Grid Scheduling and Resource Management

Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective resource utilisation monitoring and highly granular yet adaptive measurements are prerequisites for a more efficient Grid scheduler. We present a suite of measurement applications able to monitor per-process resource utilisation, and a customisable tool for emulating observed utilisation models. We also outline our future work on a predictive and probabilistic Grid scheduler. The research is undertaken as part of UK e-Science EPSRC sponsored project SO-GRM (Self-Organising Grid Resource Management) in cooperation with BT

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)

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

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

Inter-domain Integrity Management for Programmable Network Interfaces

September 200

Enabling intercontinental e-Infrastructures - A case for Africa

CHAIN-REDS, an EU co-funded project, focuses on promoting and supporting technological and scientific collaboration across different e-Infrastructures established and operated in various continents. The project implemented a Regional Operations Centre (ROC) model for enabling Grid computing interoperation across continents, and an operational ROC has been set up for Africa. Moreover, the project operates a global Cloud federation test-bed, where also nascent African Cloud sites contribute. Finally, the project is supporting a real-life use-case from Africa that of APHRC, using its data e-Infrastructure services