Grid-Controlled Lightpaths for High Performance Grid Applications

Grid applications call for high performance networking support. One attractive solution is to deploy Grids over optical networks. However, resource management in optical domains is traditionally very rigid and cannot successfully meet the requirements of Grid applications, such as flexible provisioning and configuration. In this paper, we present a customizable resource management solution for optical networks where users can create lightpaths on demand and manage their own network resources. Thanks to a Grid-centric system architecture, lightpath resources can be shared among users and easily integrated with data and computation Grids.     

Analysis and Provision of QoS for Distributed Grid Applications

Grid computing provides the infrastructure necessary to access and use distributed resources as part of virtual organizations. When used in this way, Grid computing makes it possible for users to participate in collaborative and distributed applications such as tele-immersion, visualization, and computational simulation. Some of these applications operate in a collaborative mode, requiring data to be stored and delivered in a timely manner. This class of applications must adhere to stringent real-time constraints and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. A QoS management approach is therefore required to orchestrate and guarantee the timely interaction between such applications and services. We discuss the design and a prototype implementation of a QoS system, and demonstrate how we enable Grid applications to become QoS compliant. We validate this approach through a case study of an image processing task derived from a nanoscale structures application.     

Evaluating the reliability of computational grids from the end user’s point of view

Reliability, in terms of Grid component fault tolerance and minimum quality of service, is an important aspect that has to be addressed to foster Grid technology adoption. Software reliability is critically important in today’s integrated and distributed systems, as is often the weak link in system performance. In general, reliability is difficult to measure, and specially in Grid environments, where evaluation methodologies are novel and controversial matters. This paper describes a straightforward procedure to analyze the reliability of computational grids from the viewpoint of an end user. The procedure is illustrated in the evaluation of a research Grid infrastructure based on Globus basic services and the GridWay meta-scheduler. The GridWay support for fault tolerance is also demonstrated in a production-level environment. Results show that GridWay is a reliable workload management tool for dynamic and faulty Grid environments. Transparently to the end user, GridWay is able to detect and recover from any of the Grid element failure, outage and saturation conditions specified by the reliability analysis procedure.     

A P2P strategy for QoS discovery and SLA negotiation in Grid environment

In recent years, Grid systems and Peer to Peer networks are the most commonly-used solutions to achieve the same goal: the sharing of resources and services in heterogeneous, dynamic, distributed environments. Many studies have proposed hybrid approaches that try to conjugate the advantages of the two models. This paper proposes an architecture that integrates the P2P interaction model in Grid environments, so as to build an open cooperative model wherein Grid entities are composed in a decentralized way. In particular, this paper focuses on a QoS aware discovery algorithm for P2P Grid systems, analyzing protocol and explaining techniques used to improve its performance.     

Service selection and workflow mapping for Grids: an approach exploiting quality‐of‐service information

The advent of heterogeneous and distributed environments, such as Grid environments, made feasible the solution to computational‐intensive problems in a reliable and cost‐effective manner. In parallel, workflows with increased complexity that require specialized systems to deal with them are emerging, so as to carry out more composite and mission‐critical applications. In that rationale, quality‐of‐service (QoS) issues need to be tackled in order to ensure that each application satisfies the corresponding user requirements. Therefore, considering the quality provision aspect as fundamental for enabling Grid applications to become QoS compliant, we present an approach for service selection using QoS criteria. The latter is achieved with a suite of components that allow the different mappings of application workflow processes to Grid services that not only meet the user goals and requirements but also maximize his/her benefit in terms of the offered QoS level. We also demonstrate the operation of the aforementioned suite of components and evaluate its performance and effectiveness using a Grid scenario, based on a 3D image rendering application. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interactive 3D HD video transport for e-science collaboration over UCLP-enabled GLORIAD lightpath

Emerging large-scale applications for e-science and Grid require end-to-end lightpaths that need to be dynamically provisioned with QoS (quality of service) guarantees. In this paper, an e-science collaboration is demonstrated as a part of iGRID2005, where an interactive 3D HD (high definition) video transport is realized over an inter-continental lambda integrated facility on 10 Gbps GLORIAD links. To realize real-time interactive (2-way) collaboration among scientific researchers, the 10 Gbps end-to-end user-controlled lightpath between Korea and USA is dynamically provided with very high network performance. Both uncompressed and stereoscopic HD videos are then exchanged between participating sites. Thus, we verify the potential of proposed e-science collaborations by discussing underlying lambda networking infrastructure, UCLP-enabled dynamic lightpath provisioning, HD video system setup and integration, and demonstration results.     

An integration experience of a software architecture and a monitoring infrastructure to deploy applications with non‐functional requirements in computing grids

Resource management is an important aspect to consider regarding applications that might have different non‐functional or operational requirements, when running in distributed and heterogeneous environments. In this context, it is necessary to provide the means to specify the required resource constraints and an infrastructure that can adapt the applications in light of the changes in resource availability. We adopted a contract‐based approach to describe and maintain parallel applications that have non‐functional requirements in a Computing Grid context, called ZeliGrid. To form the supporting infrastructure we have designed a software architecture that integrates some of the Globus services, the LDAP and the NWS monitoring services. Some modules that map the contract approach into software artifacts were also integrated to this architecture. This paper addresses the architecture and integration issues of our approach, as well as how we put the pieces together highlighting deployment and implementation details, which have to consider diverse aspects such as monitoring, security and dynamic reconfiguration. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multi-domain Lambda Grid data portal for collaborative Grid applications

This paper presents the iGrid2005 demonstration of the multi-domain Lambda Grid data portal to enable collaborative Grid applications to retrieve gigabyte-size scientific datasets on demand over a wide-area Lambda Grid test-bed spanning across the United States and Europe. The data portal allows collaborative users to register and discover distributed datasets across a multi-domain Lambda Grid through a web-service based dataset registry and search engine, and to deliver the discovered datasets through dynamic established lightpaths to specified computing cluster locations for dataset manipulation. The data portal employs the novel Secure Photonic Inter-domain Negotiator (SPIN) as a secure multi-domain control plane to set up dynamic lightpaths between the source and destination clusters for respective storage and manipulation of the discovered datasets over a multi-domain Lambda Grid. The data portal employs lambda-aware middleware and transport protocol to optimize transfer of the discovered datasets over the dynamic established lightpaths. Implementation details and observed performance results from the demonstrations of the SPIN-based Lambda Grid data portal are reported.     

Experimenting Active Reliable Multicast on Application-Aware Grids

The ever growing needs for computation power and accesses to critical resources have launched in a very short time a large number of grid projects and many realizations have been done on dedicated network infrastructures. On Internet-based infrastructures, however, there are very few distributed or interactive applications (MPI, DIS, HLA, remote visualization) because of insufficient end-to-end performances (bandwidth, latency, for example) to support such an interactivity. For the moment, computing resources and network resources are viewed separately in the Grid architecture and we believe this is the main bottleneck for achieving end-to-end performances. In this paper, we promote the idea of a Grid infrastructure able to adapt to the applications needs and thus define the idea of application-aware Grid infrastructures where the network infrastructure is tightly involved in both the communication and processing process. We report on our early experiences in building application-aware components based on active networking technologies for providing a low latency and a low overhead multicast framework for applications running on a computational Grid. Performance results from both simulations and implementation prototypes confirm that introducing application-aware components at specific location in the network infrastructure can succeed in providing not only performances for the end-users but also new perspectives in building a communication framework for computational Grids.     

ICENI: Optimisation of component applications within a Grid environment

Effective exploitation of Computational Grids can only be achieved when applications are fully integrated with the Grid middleware and the underlying computational resources. Fundamental to this exploitation is information. Information about the structure and behaviour of the application, the capability of the computational and networking resources, and the availability and access to these resources by an individual, a group or an organisation.

In this paper we describe Imperial College e-Science Networked Infrastructure (ICENI), a Grid middleware framework developed within the London e-Science Centre. ICENI is a platform-independent framework that uses open and extensible XML derived protocols, within a framework built using Java and Jini, to explore effective application execution upon distributed federated resources. We match a high-level application specification, defined as a network of components, to an optimal combination of the currently available component implementations within our Grid environment, by using composite performance models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture through the high-level specification and solution of a set of linear equations by automatic and selection of optimal resources and implementations.