Direction-aware resource discovery in large-scale distributed computing environments

As a system scales up, the peer-to-peer (P2P) approach is attractive to distributed computing environments, such as Grids and Clouds, due to the amount of resources increased. The major issue in large-scale distributed systems is to prevent the phenomenon of a communication bottleneck or a single point of failure. Conventional approaches may not be able to apply directly to such environments due to restricted queries and varied resource characteristics. Alternatively, a fully decentralized resource discovery service based on an unstructured overlay, which relies only on the information of resource attributes and characteristics, may be a feasible solution. One major challenge of such service is to locate desired and suitable resources without the global knowledge of distributed sharing resources. As a consequence, the more nodes the resource discovery service involves, the higher the network overhead incurs. In this paper, we proposed a direction-aware strategy which can alleviate the network traffic among unstructured information systems for distributed resource discovery service. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves higher success rate at low cost and higher scalability.     

A New Grid Scheduler with Failure Recovery and Rescheduling Mechanisms: Discussion and Analysis

Computational Grids (CGs) have become an appealing research area. They suggest a suitable environment for developing large scale parallel applications. CGs integrate a huge mount of distributed heterogeneous resources for constituting a powerful virtual supercomputer. Scheduling is the most important issue for enhancing the performance of CGs. Various strategies have been introduced, including static and dynamic behaviors. The former maps tasks to resources at submission time, while the latter operates at run time. While static scheduling is unsuitable for the dynamic Grid environment, scheduling in CGs is still more complex than the proposed dynamic solutions. This paper introduces a decentralized Adaptive Grid Scheduler (AGS) based on a novel rescheduling mechanism. AGS has several salient properties as it is; hybrid, adaptive, decentralized, and efficient. Also, AGS is a robust mechanism as it has the ability to; (i) detect resource failures, (ii) continue its functionality in spite of the failure existence, then (iii) recover back. Moreover, it integrates both static and dynamic scheduling behaviors. An initial static scheduling map is proposed for an input Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG). However, DAG tasks may be rescheduled if the performance of the allocated resources changes in away that may affect the tasks’ response time. AGS overcomes drawbacks of traditional schedulers by utilizing the mobile agent unique features to enhance the resource discovery and monitoring processes. Experimental results have shown that AGS outperforms traditional Grid schedulers as it introduces a better scheduling efficiency.     

An improved load-balancing mechanism based on deadline failure recovery on GridSim

Grid computing has emerged a new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing. It focuses on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications and in some cases, high performance orientation. The Grid serves as a comprehensive and complete system for organizations by which the maximum utilization of resources is achieved. The load balancing is a process which involves the resource management and an effective load distribution among the resources. Therefore, it is considered to be very important in Grid systems. For a Grid, a dynamic, distributed load balancing scheme provides deadline control for tasks. Due to the condition of deadline failure, developing, deploying, and executing long running applications over the grid remains a challenge. So, deadline failure recovery is an essential factor for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a dynamic distributed load-balancing technique called “Enhanced GridSim with Load balancing based on Deadline Failure Recovery” (EGDFR) for computational Grids with heterogeneous resources. The proposed algorithm EGDFR is an improved version of the existing EGDC in which we perform load balancing by providing a scheduling system which includes the mechanism of recovery from deadline failure of the Gridlets. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to quantify the performance of the proposed load-balancing strategy on the GridSim platform. Experiments have shown that the proposed system can considerably improve Grid performance in terms of total execution time, percentage gain in execution time, average response time, resubmitted time and throughput. The proposed load-balancing technique gives 7 % better performance than EGDC in case of constant number of resources, whereas in case of constant number of Gridlets, it gives 11 % better performance than EGDC.     

Entropic Grid Scheduling

Computational Grids (CGs) are large scale dynamical networks of geographically distributed peer resource clusters. These clusters are independent but cooperating computing systems bound by a management framework for the provision of computing services, called Grid Services. In its basic form, the Grid scheduling problem consists in finding at least one cluster that has the capacity to handle, within the constraints of a specified quality of service, a user service request submitted to the CG. Since CGs span distinct management domains, the scheduling process has to be decentralized. Furthermore, it has to account for the ubiquitous uncertainty on the state of the CG. In this paper, we propose a scalable distributed Entropy-based scheduling approach that utilizes a Markov chain model to capture the dynamics of the service capacity state. An entropy-based quantification of the uncertainty on the service capacity information is developed and explicitly integrated within the proposed Grid scheduling approach. The performance of the proposed scheduling strategy is validated, through simulation, against a random delegation scheme and a load balancing-based scheduling strategy with respect to throughput, exploitation and convergence speed, respectively.     

一种基于人工免疫的新的网格资源调度算法

由于广域网性能的巨大提高和功能强大且价格低廉的计算机不断增多,网格计算以一种极具有前途和吸引力的新范式出现。网格计算是集成地理位置分布,异构,多领域资源的一种平台,它提供透明、安全、同等、高性能资源共享。要获取计算网格中潜在的能量,设计一种有效和高效的网格资源调度算法很重要。网格独特的特点使得网格环境下的资源调度是相当复杂的。本文将重点设计一种新的基于免疫算法的网格资源调度算法。     

集成P2P模式的网格资源发现算法研究

网格计算和对等计算有很多可以融合的特征。在传统的网格环境中,资源的发现和定位主要用集中式或者分层式来解决,随着网格规模的扩大,这种方式明显不适合网格环境。另一方面,P2P为大规模分布式环境下有效地发现资源提供了可扩展性方案。首先提出了一种集成P2P模式的网格资源管理模型,然后基于该模型提出了一种融合遗传和蚂蚁算法的资源发现算法。理论分析和仿真证明了遗传蚂蚁算法能有效地提高P2PGrid环境下的资源发现性能。     

Coordinated load management in Peer-to-Peer coupled federated grid systems

This paper proposes a coordinated load management protocol for Peer-to-Peer?(P2P) coupled federated Grid systems. The participants in the system, such as the resource providers and the consumers who belong to multiple control domains, work together to enable a coordinated federation. The coordinated load management protocol embeds a logical spatial index over a Distributed Hash Table?(DHT) space for efficient management of the coordination objects; the DHT-based space serves as a kind of decentralized blackboard system. We show that our coordination protocol has a message complexity that is logarithmic to the number of nodes in the system, which is significantly better than existing broadcast based coordination protocols. The proposed load management protocol can be applied for efficiently coordinating resource brokering services of distributed computing systems such as grids and PlanetLab. Resource brokering services are the main components that control the way applications are scheduled, managed and allocated in a distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic Grid computing environments. Existing Grid resource brokers, e-Science application work-flow schedulers, operate in tandem but still lack a coordination mechanism that can lead to efficient application schedules across distributed resources. Further, lack of coordination exacerbates the utilization of various resources (such as computing cycles and network bandwidth). The feasibility of the proposed coordinated load management protocol is studied through extensive simulations.     

Towards supporting multiple virtual private computing environments on computational Grids

Grid computing now becomes a practical computing paradigm and solution for distributed systems and applications. Currently increasing resources are involved in Grid environments and a large number of applications are running on computational Grids. Unfortunately Grid computing technologies are still far away from reach of inexperienced application users, e.g., computational scientists and engineers. A software layer is required to provide an easy interface of Grids to end users.To meet this requirement HEAVEN (Hosting European Application Virtual ENvironment) upperware is proposed to build on top of Grid middleware. This paper presents HEAVEN philosophy of virtual computing for Grids – a combinational idea of simulation and emulation approaches. The concept of Virtual Private Computing Environment (VPCE) is thereafter proposed and defined. The design and current implementation of HEAVEN upperware are discussed in detail. Use case of Ag2D application justifies the philosophy of HEAVEN virtual computing methodology and the design/implementation of HEAVEN upperware.     

Scalable dimensioning of resilient Lambda Grids

Grids consist of the aggregation of numerous dispersed computational, storage and network resources, able to satisfy even the most demanding computing jobs. Due to the data-intensive nature of Grid jobs, there is an increasing interest in Grids using optical transport networks as this technology allows for the timely delivery of large amounts of data. Such Grids are commonly referred to as Lambda Grids.

An important aspect of Grid deployment is the allocation and activation of installed network capacity, needed to transfer data and jobs to and from remote resources. However, the exact nature of a Grid’s network traffic depends on the way arriving workload is scheduled over the various Grid sites. As Grids possibly feature high numbers of resources, jobs and users, solving the combined Grid network dimensioning and workload scheduling problem requires the use of scalable mathematical methods such as Divisible Load Theory (DLT). Lambda Grids feature additional complexity such as wavelength granularity and continuity or conversion constraints must be enforced. Additionally, Grid resources cannot be expected to be available at all times. Therefore, the extra complexity of resilience against possible resource failures must be taken into account when modelling the combined Grid network dimensioning and workload scheduling problem, enforcing the need for scalable solution methods. In this work, we tackle the Lambda Grid combined dimensioning and workload scheduling problem and incorporate single-resource failure or unavailability scenarios. We use Divisible Load Theory to tackle the scalability problem and compare non-resilient lambda Grid dimensioning to the dimensions needed to survive single-resource failures. We distinguish three failure scenarios relevant to lambda Grid deployment: computational element, network link and optical cross-connect failure. Using regular network topologies, we derive analytical bounds on the dimensioning cost. To validate these bounds, we present comparisons for the resulting Grid dimensions assuming a 2-tier Grid operation as a function of varying wavelength granularity, fiber/wavelength cost models, traffic demand asymmetry and Grid scheduling strategy for a specific set of optical transport networks.     

Integration of task abortion and security requirements in GA-based meta-heuristics for independent batch grid scheduling

Scheduling and resource allocation in large scale distributed environments, such as Computational Grids (CGs), arise new requirements and challenges not considered in traditional distributed computing environments. Among these new requirements, task abortion and security become needful criteria for Grid schedulers. The former arises due to the dynamics of the Grid systems, in which resources are expected to enter and leave the system in an unpredictable way. The latter requirement appears crucial in Grid systems mainly due to a multi-domain nature of CGs. The main aim of this paper is to develop a scheduling model that enables the aggregation of task abortion and security requirements as additional, together with makespan and flowtime, scheduling criteria into a cumulative objective function. We demonstrate the high effectiveness of genetic-based schedulers in finding near-optimal solutions for multi-objective scheduling problem, where all criteria (objectives) are simultaneously optimized. The proposed meta-heuristics are experimentally evaluated in static and dynamic Grid scenarios by using a Grid simulator. The obtained results show the fast reduction of the values of basic scheduler performance metrics, especially in the dynamic case, that confirms the usefulness of the proposed approach in real-life scenarios.     

分布式空间信息的对等协同混合发现模型*

海量空间信息的处理需要分布式协同工作的GIS平台的支持,为了解决经典的分散式结构化的分布式哈希表逻辑网络结构增加的延时和在构建哈希表的过程中逻辑覆盖网络往往和物理网络不一致的问题,提出一种分布式空间信息的对等协同混合发现模型。基于空间资源发现代理节点和普通邻居节点,该模型实现了集中式的全局空间资源发现模型与分散式结构化的分布式哈希表模型之间的自动切换,能够自适应地调整空间资源的逻辑网络结构以提供更好的性能。基于节点交换机制,设计了构建路由表和降低延时的算法,通过发现有利于覆盖网络和物理网络匹配的节点交换来     

MidHDC: Advanced topics on middleware services for heterogeneous distributed computing. Part 2

Currently distributes systems support different computing paradigms like Cluster Computing, Grid Computing, Peer-to-Peer Computing, and Cloud Computing all involving elements of heterogeneity. These computing distributed systems are often characterized by a variety of resources that may or may not be coupled with specific platforms or environments. All these topics challenge today researchers, due to the strong dynamic behavior of the user communities and of resource collections they use.The second part of this special issue presents advances in allocation algorithms, service selection, VM consolidation and mobility policies, scheduling multiple virtual environments and scientific workflows, optimization in scheduling process, energy-aware scheduling models, failure Recovery in shared Big Data processing systems, distributed transaction processing middleware, data storage, trust evaluation, information diffusion, mobile systems, integration of robots in Cloud systems.     

Grid programming: some indications where we are headed

Grid computing enables the development of large scientific applications on an unprecedented scale. Grid-aware applications, also called meta-applications or multi-disciplinary applications, make use of coupled computational resources that are not available at a single site. In this light, the Grids let scientists solve larger or new problems by pooling together resources that could not be coupled easily before. It is well known that the programmer’s productivity in designing and implementing efficient distributed/parallel applications on high-performance computers is still usually a very time-consuming task. Grid computing makes the situation worse. Consequently, the development of Grid programming environments that would enable programmers to efficiently exploit this technology is an important and hot research issue.

After an introduction on the main Grid programming issues, this paper will review the most important approaches/projects conducted in this field worldwide.     

Riding Out the Storm: How to Deal with the Complexity of Grid and Cloud Management

Over the last decade, Grid computing paved the way for a new level of large scale distributed systems. This infrastructure made it possible to securely and reliably take advantage of widely separated computational resources that are part of several different organizations. Resources can be incorporated to the Grid, building a theoretical virtual supercomputer. In time, cloud computing emerged as a new type of large scale distributed system, inheriting and expanding the expertise and knowledge that have been obtained so far. Some of the main characteristics of Grids naturally evolved into clouds, others were modified and adapted and others were simply discarded or postponed. Regardless of these technical specifics, both Grids and clouds together can be considered as one of the most important advances in large scale distributed computing of the past ten years; however, this step in distributed computing has came along with a completely new level of complexity. Grid and cloud management mechanisms play a key role, and correct analysis and understanding of the system behavior are needed. Large scale distributed systems must be able to self-manage, incorporating autonomic features capable of controlling and optimizing all resources and services. Traditional distributed computing management mechanisms analyze each resource separately and adjust specific parameters of each one of them. When trying to adapt the same procedures to Grid and cloud computing, the vast complexity of these systems can make this task extremely complicated. But large scale distributed systems complexity could only be a matter of perspective. It could be possible to understand the Grid or cloud behavior as a single entity, instead of a set of resources. This abstraction could provide a different understanding of the system, describing large scale behavior and global events that probably would not be detected analyzing each resource separately. In this work we define a theoretical framework that combines both ideas, multiple resources and single entity, to develop large scale distributed systems management techniques aimed at system performance optimization, increased dependability and Quality of Service (QoS). The resulting synergy could be the key to address the most important difficulties of Grid and cloud management.     

Resource brokering using a multi‐site resource allocation strategy for computational grids

Grid computing employs heterogeneous resources which may be installed on different platforms, hardware/software, computer architectures, and perhaps using different computer languages to solve large‐scale computational problems. As many more Grids are being developed worldwide, the number of multi‐institutional collaborations is growing rapidly. However, to realize Grid computing's full potential, it is expected that Grid participants must be able to share one another's resources. This paper presents a resource broker that employs the multi‐site resource allocation (MSRA) strategy and the dynamic domain‐based network information model that we propose to allocate Grid resources to submitted jobs, where the Grid resources may be dispersed at different sites, and owned and governed by different organizations or institutes. The jobs and resources may also belong to different clusters/sites. Resource statuses collected by the Ganglia, and network bandwidths gathered by the Network Weather Service, are both considered in the proposed scheduling approach. A dynamic domain‐based model for network information measurement is also proposed to choose the most appropriate resources that meet the jobs' execution requirements. Experimental results show that MSRA outperformed the other tested strategies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A probabilistic and adaptive scheduling algorithm using system-generated predictions for inter-grid resource sharing

Rapid advancement and more readily availability of Grid technologies have encouraged many businesses and researchers to establish Virtual Organizations (VO) and make use of their available desktop resources to solve computing intensive problems. These VOs, however, work as disjointed and independent communities with no resource sharing between them. We, in previous work, have proposed a fully decentralized and reconfigurable Inter-Grid framework for resource sharing among such distributed and autonomous Grid systems (Rao et al. in ICCSA, [2006]). The specific problem that underlies in such a collaborating Grids system is scheduling of resources as there is very little knowledge about availability of the resources due to the distributed and autonomous nature of the underlying Grid entities. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic and adaptive scheduling algorithm using system-generated predictions for Inter-Grid resource sharing keeping collaborating Grid systems autonomous and independent. We first use system-generated job runtime estimates without actually submitting jobs to the target Grid system. Then this job execution estimate is used to predict the job scheduling feasibility on the target system. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm adapted itself to the actual resource behavior and performance. Simulation results are presented to discuss the correctness and accuracy of our proposed algorithm.

EDGeS: Bridging EGEE to BOINC and XtremWeb

Desktop Grids, such as XtremWeb and BOINC, and Service Grids, such as EGEE, are two different approaches for science communities to gather computing power from a large number of computing resources. Nevertheless, little work has been done to combine these two Grid technologies in order to establish a seamless and vast Grid resource pool. In this paper we present the EGEE Service Grid, the BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids. Then, we present the EDGeS solution to bridge the EGEE Service Grid with the BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids.     

Characterizing Grids: Attributes, Definitions, and Formalisms

Grid systems and technologies have evolved over nearly a decade; yet, there is still no widely accepted definition for Grids. In particular, the essential attributes that distinguish Grids from other distributed computing environments have not been articulated. Most approaches to definition adopt a static view and consider only the properties and components of, or the applications supported by, Grids. The definition proposed in this paper is based on the runtime semantics of distributed systems. Rather than attempt to simply compare static characteristics of Grids and other distributed computing environments, this paper analyzes operational differences, from the viewpoint of an application executing in both environments. Our definition is expressed formally as an Abstract State Machine that facilitates the analysis of existing Grid systems or the design of new ones with rigor and precision. This new, semantical approach proposes an alternative to the currently accepted models for determining whether or not a distributed system is a Grid.     

The Virtual Laboratory: a toolset to enable distributed molecular modelling for drug design on the World‐Wide Grid

Computational Grids are emerging as a new paradigm for sharing and aggregation of geographically distributed resources for solving large‐scale compute and data intensive problems in science, engineering and commerce. However, application development, resource management and scheduling in these environments is a complex undertaking. In this paper, we illustrate the development of a Virtual Laboratory environment by leveraging existing Grid technologies to enable molecular modelling for drug design on geographically distributed resources. It involves screening millions of compounds in the chemical database (CDB) against a protein target to identify those with potential use for drug design. We have used the Nimrod‐G parameter specification language to transform the existing molecular docking application into a parameter sweep application for executing on distributed systems. We have developed new tools for enabling access to ligand records/molecules in the CDB from remote resources. The Nimrod‐G resource broker along with molecule CDB data broker is used for scheduling and on‐demand processing of docking jobs on the World‐Wide Grid (WWG) resources. The results demonstrate the ease of use and power of the Nimrod‐G and virtual laboratory tools for grid computing. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Market-oriented Grids and Utility Computing: The State-of-the-art and Future Directions

Traditional resource management techniques (resource allocation, admission control and scheduling) have been found to be inadequate for many shared Grid and distributed systems, that consist of autonomous and dynamic distributed resources contributed by multiple organisations. They provide no incentive for users to request resources judiciously and appropriately, and do not accurately capture the true value, importance and deadline (the utility) of a user’s job. Furthermore, they provide no compensation for resource providers to contribute their computing resources to shared Grids, as traditional approaches have a user-centric focus on maximising throughput and minimising waiting time rather than maximising a providers own benefit. Consequently, researchers and practitioners have been examining the appropriateness of ‘market-inspired’ resource management techniques to address these limitations. Such techniques aim to smooth out access patterns and reduce the chance of transient overload, by providing a framework for users to be truthful about their resource requirements and job deadlines, and offering incentives for service providers to prioritise urgent, high utility jobs over low utility jobs. We examine the recent innovations in these systems (from 2000–2007), looking at the state-of-the-art in price setting and negotiation, Grid economy management and utility-driven scheduling and resource allocation, and identify the advantages and limitations of these systems. We then look to the future of these systems, examining the emerging ‘Catallaxy’ market paradigm. Finally we consider the future directions that need to be pursued to address the limitations of the current generation of market oriented Grids and Utility Computing systems.