Björn Hagemeier

elasticLM: A Novel Approach for Software Licensing in Distributed Computing Infrastructures

A recent survey of the 451group on Cloud usage highlights software licensing as one of the top five obstacles for Cloud computing, quite similar to what has been observed in the Grid already a couple of years. The reasons are the same: the current praxis of software licensing, both in terms of business models and licensing technology. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments, especially when the environment stretches across administrative domains like it is the case for public Clouds. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application.

SLA-based management of software licenses as web service resources in distributed computing infrastructures

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed computing infrastructure stretches across administrative domains. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may travel to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. A first implementation has been realised for dynamic Grid environments in the European SmartLM project co-funded by the European Commission. The SmartLM solution decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution. All authorisations are expressed as and guaranteed by Service Level Agreements. We will present the core technology, discuss various security aspects and how they are addressed in the SmartLM prototype, and present the evaluation of the prototype through a number of usage scenarios. Finally, we will give an outlook on specific issues and current work extending the solution to Clouds and service based systems in general.

SLA-based management of software licenses as web service resources in distributed environments

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable especially when the distributed environment stretches across administrative domains. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. A first implementation has been realised for dynamic Grid environments in the European SmartLM project co-funded by the European Commission. The SmartLM solution decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution. All authorisations are expressed as and guaranteed by Service Level Agreements. We will present the core technology, discuss various security aspects and how they are addressed in SmartLM, and present a number of usage scenarios leveraged by the SmartLM technology. Finally, we will give an outlook on specific issues and current work extending the solution to Clouds and service based systems in general.

A business-oriented grid workflow management system

The wide adoption of Service Oriented Architecture by the Grid community has made available several software tools that allow exposing hardware resources and scientific data to remote peers by means of well standardized protocols. Hence the necessity for scientists to easily design a simulation that leverages distributed applications. In this paper, we present the implementation details of A-WARE, a workflow framework that adopts recognised standards, especially by the enterprise community, like BPEL. In this way our product can boast a higher level of interoperability with other similar systems. The workflow graphical notation is also based on a standard: BPMN. BPMN provides a unique, standardized and comprehensive modeling format understandable by both business people (involved in the area of business process management) and IT people, resulting also portable across different departments or companies.

Software licenses as mobile objects in distributed computing environments

Current praxis of software licensing has been identified as major obstacle for Grid computing a couple of years ago already. Recent surveys of Clouds indicate that the same holds true for Cloud computing. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage during application run-time traditional software licensing practices are not suitable. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. The SmartLM solution, which has been recently implemented as a prototype decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution.

A one-stop, fire-and-(almost)forget, dropping-off and rendezvous point

In order to foster uptake by scientific and business users we need an easy way to access Grid resources. This is the motivation for the A-WARE project. We build upon a fabric layer of Grid and other resources, by providing a higher-layer service for managing the interaction with these resources - A One-Stop, Fire-and-(almost)Forget, Dropping-off and Rendezvous Point. Work assignments can be formulated using domain specific dialects, allowing users to express themselves in their domain of expertise. Both Web service and REST bindings are provided, as well as allowing the component to be embedded into other presentation technologies (such as portals). In addition common desktop notification mechanisms such as Email, RSS/Atom feeds and instant messaging keep users informed and in control. We propose using the Java Business Integration specification as the framework for building such a higher-level component, delivering unprecedented opportunities for the integration of Grid technologies with the enterprise computing infrastructures commonly found in businesses.

UniProv: A Flexible Provenance Tracking System for UNICORE

In this paper we present a flexible provenance management system called UniProv. UniProv is an ongoing development project providing provenance tracking in scientific workflows and data management particularly in the field of neuroscience, thus allowing users to validate and reproduce tasks and results of their experiments.

UniProv - Provenance Management for UNICORE Workflows in HPC Environments.

The goal of comprehensive provenance tracking in the scientific environment should be the inclusion of the entire life cycle of data management. Thus, the data collection process begins with the registration of lab-generated or sensor-generated data, continues to organize and manage data in the storage repositories, processing analysis and simulation data on clusters and HPC systems, and finally referencing and verifying computational results in scientific publications. In the associated provenance tracking life cycle, UniProv initially concentrates on the processing and simulation of data in scientific workflows used in particular on supercomputers in the HPC environment. In this context, UniProv aims to create the core of a provenance management framework that can be extended in order to integrate different sources of the scientific provenance cycle. Here UniProv should facilitate the creation, the standardized formalization, the storage and the retrieval of Provenance Information.

Framework for Sharing of Highly Resolved Turbulence Simulation Data

The growing computational capabilities of nowadays supercomputers have made highly resolved turbulence simulations possible. The large data-sets and tremendous amount of required compute resources create serious new challenges when attempting to share the data between different research groups. But even more difficult to solve is the incompatibility of the data formats and numerical approaches used for turbulence simulations, which in detail are often only known to the simulation code developer. In this paper a framework for sharing data of large scale simulations is presented, which simplifies the access and further post-processing even beyond a single supercomputing center. It combines established services to provide an easy to manage-and-extend software setup without the need to standardize a database or -format. Beside other advantages, it enables the use of direct file outputs from simulation runs which are often archived anyway.

UNICORE EMI-Execution Service realization towards improved open standards

The EMI project unites a set of production Grid middleware technologies providing scientific communities a secure access to distributed and heterogeneous, compute and data resources. Within the EMI compute area, job management and monitoring are considered to be the most significant areas of work. Based on earlier Open Grid Forum (OGF) Production Grid Infrastructure (PGI) activities the existing standards and their adoption in the domain of job management on distributed computing infrastructures have been reviewed. As a consequence, several advanced execution service concepts have been identified that influenced the EMI-ES specification. The goal of this paper is to present the concepts of the EMI-ES interface and its information model that is required to manage, monitor, and model activities in production Grids. In this paper, we will delineate the architectural details of EMI-ES, and one of its ‘proof of concept’ realizations in UNICORE. The feedback of these activities is already part of the standardization process in OGF, and this paper puts existing Grid standards in context by comparing them with the proposed specification.