Bastian Koller

Towards SLA-Supported resource management

Achievements and experiences in projects with focus on resource management have shown that the goals and needs of High Performance Computing service providers have not or only inadequately been taken into account in Grid research and development. Mapping real-life business behaviour and workflows within the service provider domain to the electronic level implies focusing on the business rules of the provider as well as on the complexity of the jobs and the current state of the HPC system. This paper describes an architectural approach towards a business-oriented and Service Level Agreement-supported resource management, valuable for High Performance Computing providers to offer and sell their services. With the introduction of a Conversion Factory the authors present a component that is able to combine the Service Level Agreement, the system status, and all business objectives of the provider in order to address the business needs of service providers in the Grid.

Service-oriented operating systems: future workspaces

Most people use more than one computing system for their daily work: an office computer, a corporate laptop for travel, and a private desktop computer. These machines not only differ in their power and resources but also in their environment, including deployed applications, available files, and so on. The current trend is leading to an even greater number of devices and a wider range of capabilities. This presents a major challenge to enabling the vision of the mobile user and worker. This article shows how developments in the area of service-oriented computing, embedded devices, and networking enable user-specific virtual working and private environments on the basis of new approaches toward distributed operating systems. These service-oriented operating systems extend the limited capabilities of local devices with (remote) resource pools, aimed at provisioning identical (or similar) environments in any context and location. As we explain, henceforth, future employee workspaces will concentrate much more on mobility, while the actual resources (computational power, storage, data) will be maintained through dedicated corporate server farms, thus greatly reducing the administration effort and enhancing the user experience.

Supporting collaborative engineering using an intelligent web service middleware

Collaborative Engineering tasks are difficult to manage and involve a high amount of risk - as such, these tasks generally involve only well-known pre-established relationships. Such collaborations are generally quite static and do not allow for dynamic reactions to changes in the environment. Furthermore, not all optimal resource providers can be utilised for the respective tasks as they are potentially unknown. The TrustCoM project elaborated the means to create and manage Virtual Organisations in a trusted and secure manner integrating different providers on-demand. However, TrustCoM focused more on the VO than on the participant, whereas the BREIN project is now enhancing the intelligence of such VO systems to support even providers with little business expertise and provide them with capabilities to optimise their performance. This paper analyses the capabilities of current VO frameworks on the example of TrustCoM and identifies the gaps from the participants perspective. It then shows how BREIN addresses these gaps.

e-Infrastructure for Remote Instrumentation

Despite the tremendous growth of the capacity of computation and storage IT solutions over the last years there is still a deep mismatch between the e-Infrastructures and the e-Science applications that use instruments, sensors, and laboratory equipment. The efficiency of using instruments in a remote way, i.e. Remote Instrumentation, might be largely improved by integration with the existing distributed computing and storage infrastructures, like Grids. The paper discusses major activities towards the e-Infrastructure for Remote Instrumentation - a Grid-based Information and Communication Technology environment capable of covering all the issues arising around enabling Remote Instrumentation for e-Science applications.

Flexible SLA negotiation using semantic annotations

Moving towards a global market of services requires flexible infrastructures that will deal with the inevitable semantic heterogeneity that occurs during the negotiation that precedes the trading of a service. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to understand the concepts describing the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations can increase the level of flexibility and automation, allowing the two parties to use their own terminology as long as it is related to the commonly understood conceptual model. This paper discusses how SLA negotiation will benefit from the use of a lightweight backwards compatible semantic annotation mechanism.

Remote instrumentation infrastructure for e-Science. Approach of the DORII project

Whereas the available resources and storage capabilities constitute the most important limitation for researchers in experiments to be performed, increasing availability of high-performance computing resources, provided by the Grid, has allowed many e-Science communities to proceed with new challenging experiments, especially involving expense and complex specialized measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. Remote instrumentation, which means providing control of distributed scientific instruments by users from remote locations, is an important part of functionality that applications, developed in a number of e-Science domains (among others, environmental science, earthquake engineering, experimental science), are supposed to provide. The EC-funded Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure (DORII) project aims to establish a new e-Infrastructure which allows the applications to provide remote instrumentation services in high-performance Grid computing environments. The paper presents basic aspects of the Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure deployment and further use with respect to requirements of specific application fields of e-Science.

Leveraging High-Performance Computing Infrastructures to Web Data Analytic Applications by Means of Message-Passing Interface

Modern computing technologies are increasingly getting data-centric, addressing a variety of challenges in storing, accessing, processing, and streaming massive amounts of structured and unstructured data effectively. An important analytical task in a number of scientific and technological domains is to retrieve information from all these data, aiming to get a deeper insight into the content represented by the data in order to obtain some useful, often not explicitly stated knowledge and facts, related to a particular domain of interest. The major issue is the size, structural complexity, and frequency of the analyzed data’ updates (i.e., the ‘big data’ aspect), which makes the use of traditional analysis techniques, tools, and infrastructures ineffective. We introduce an innovative approach to parallelise data-centric applications based on the Message-Passing Interface. In contrast to other known parallelisation technologies, our approach enables a very high-utilization rate and thus low costs of using productional high-performance computing and Cloud computing infrastructures. The advantages of the technique are demonstrated on a challenging Semantic Web application that is performing web-scale reasoning.

The DORII Project e-Infrastructure: Deployment, Applications, and Measurements

Remote Instrumentation Services go far beyond offering networked access to remote instrument resources. They are establishing as a way of fully integrating instruments (including laboratory equipment, large-scale experimental facilities, and sensor networks) in a Service Oriented Architecture, where users can view and operate them in the same fashion with computing and storage resources. The deployment of test beds for a large basis of scientific instrumentation and e-Science applications is mandatory to develop new functionalities to be embedded in the existing middleware to enable such integration, to test them on the field, and to promote their usage in scientific communities. The DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project is a major effort in this direction. The paper presents the performance monitoring infrastructure that has been built in DORII and the results concerning a selected application in seismic engineering.

Service Level Agreements in BREIN

With electronic business (eBusiness) becoming ubiquitous, the traditional ways of doing commerce need to be changed or completely replaced to support the end users effectively in performing their business. This includes especially the representation of business relationships with an electronic format to allow for automated processing of the respective parts of e.g. contractual obligations. One prominent representation tool are Service Level Agreements. Conceptually established as paper representation to describe parts of contracts of telecom operators, SLAs have become a research topic in the ICT domain now since several years.

Semantically supported SLA negotiation

The evolution of services market raises the need for automatic support for negotiating service use criteria. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to develop a common understanding of the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations together with reasoning can increase the level of flexibility and automation in SLA management. A framework is presented for SLA negotiation allowing the two parties to use their own terminologies.